The Home Screen

This is the screen you see when you first enroll in Diet Power. The row of buttons at the top is your gateway to all of the program's features. (You can change your Home Screen to display a graph of your Body History.)

Personal Information Form

Diet Power starts by asking your name, age, height, and special health concerns and interests. These help the program set up your files and begin customizing your nutrient requirements.

Keep Track of Workouts and Cardio

Here's a partial view of the Ideal Weight screen, showing one woman's results.

Goal Setter

Designing a diet is easy. Just click the red arrows to adjust the time span; then drag the blue paddle toward your desired weight. Meanwhile, watch the red figures at the bottom—they tell how difficult the diet will be.

Diet Description

Before adopting a diet, you can read what the diet will be like. This example is for a person who wants to lose weight at a moderate pace.

Food Log

To record meals, simply drag foods out of the dictionary at the top and drop them into the list at the bottom. You can also do "what-ifs" by watching the color-coded nutrient window that opens when you click a food.

Adding Foods to the Dictionary

Although it already lists 11,000 foods under 21,000 names, the Food Dictionary will let you add an unlimited number of your own, by keying in information from labels.

The Recipe Box

You can also add as many recipes as you like, complete with directions and nutrient analyses. (You can "doctor" any recipe by copying it and revising the ingredients.)

A Recipe Printout

Fold on the dotted line and you have a standard 4 x 6 recipe card. (To create recipes, use the Recipe Box. It will also let you e-mail your creations.)

Modifying the Dictionary

The Dictionary Abridger lets you decide which food sets will appear in your Food Dictionary.

The Exercise Log

Your workout log behaves like the Food Log, except that it also offers this calculator for activities whose "burn rates" depend on speed.

Your Body History

Instead of our logo, your Home Screen can display a history of your weight or some other value. Here, your actual, target, and projected weights are shown in red, blue, and green.

Graph Any Variable

Your Home Screen can also chart your intake of any nutrient (cholesterol or fat, for example), or any custom variable that you set up yourself. You can even smooth your data to distinguish long-term trends from day-to-day fluctuations.

Food for Thought

Each time you log on, you get inspiration or instruction that fits your current situation.

Your Nutrient History (Table View)

This shows your balance of 33 nutrients for the past day, week, month, quarter, and year. It's updated every time you log a food. It also tells you the easiest ways to improve your Nutrition Quotient.

Your Nutrient History (Bar Chart)

This shows your balance of 33 nutrients for the past day, week, month, quarter, and year. It's updated every time you log a food. It also tells you the easiest ways to improve your Nutrition Quotient.

Your Food Coach

Click any nutrient and your Food Coach will open, telling whether you're high or low in that nutrient and which foods to eat or avoid if you want to improve your intake.

Your Food Coach

Click any nutrient and your Food Coach will open, telling whether you're high or low in that nutrient and which foods to eat or avoid if you want to improve your intake.

Are You Drinking Enough Water?

Most people don't. Use the WaterMinder™ to get an alert whenever your intake falls behind schedule.

Calendar and Notepad

Use this to keep a diary or schedule appointments. It also lets you return to your logs for any day in the past and make corrections. The changes immediately cascade to today's calorie budget and nutrient charts.

Your Diet History

This is a complete record of every diet you've been on since you joined Diet Power. Among other things, it shows how your metabolic rate fluctuates over time.

Setting Your Daily Allowances

Diet Power starts you off with standard allowances -- but if you want to change your intake of a major nutrient, you can do it with these colored slider bars. You can also revise other nutrients by typing new figures over the old.

If You Need a Calculator...

Two Megabytes of Help

Diet Power's Help system offers 100,000 words (the length of a novel) on hundreds of topics, from Alcohol to Zinc. It's one of the world's easiest to read and understand. And you don't have to search it interminably -- most topics are linked directly to the screen where they're needed.