Monitor Your Exercise and Count Calories

Speaking of a balanced life, one of the most challenging aspects of healthy living for just about anyone who's mobile enough and busy enough to benefit from using a Treo is eating properly and exercising enough. An application called Diet and Exercise Assistant by Keyoe makes it possible to exert some serious control over your diet and exercise needs. Whether your goal is weight loss or just a healthy level of general maintenance, you'll likely find Diet and Exercise Assistant to be a useful application for your Treo. You can download the application from the Keyoe website at http://www.keyoe.com/.

When you first launch Diet and Exercise Assistant, which is actually called Diet on the main application screen, you're prompted to step through an interview that asks questions about your current health, your goals, what kind of diet plan you're interested in, and so on. The first step includes entering information such as your current age, height, and gender. From there, you enter your current weight along with a goal for a desired weight. You then press on and select a diet plan, such as low calorie, low carb, low fat, or custom. Things start to get interesting toward the end of the interview process, when you're presented with a specific diet plan that lists your target daily caloric intake as well as the number of grams of each food type you need to eat to stay on track (see Figure 15.6).

Figure 15.6. Step 3 of the diet planner summarizes your daily intake of calories and specific amounts of each food type.

Note

Diet and Exercise Assistant actually consists of two applications on your Treo: Diet and Foods. The Diet application is the main application where you manage your diet and exercise and chart your progress toward a specific health goal. The Food application is a database of foods that the Diet application uses to help plan a diet.

Admittedly, it takes a fair amount of discipline to truly benefit from using Diet and Exercise Assistant. However, if you commit to tracking everything you eat, you'll find that you can really take control of your diet and health. Figure 15.7 shows the daily logbook after breakfast, in which case 184 calories were consumed. Basal metabolic rate (BMR) is a measure of how many calories you burn doing normal everyday functions, excluding exercise.

Figure 15.7. The daily logbook in Diet and Exercise Assistant is where you see your daily food intake balanced against calories burned through everyday tasks as well as exercise.

You'll notice several icons along the bottom of the screen. Each icon accesses a different part of the Diet application so that you can chart your diet and exercise in extreme detail. Tracking your food intake and burned calories with such ruthless efficiency might not be your cup of tea, but it's a handy usage of your Treo if you have the desire and commitment to do so.

Note

If you want to explore other diet and nutrition applications for your Treo, HealtheTech, Skyscape, and even Weight Watchers offer interesting applications. HealtheTech's application is called BalanceLog, and it's available online at http://www.healthetech.com/balancelog/. Skyscape offers The South Beach Diet OnHand, which is available at http://www.skyscape.com/. And finally, Weight Watchers On-the-Go is available at http://www.weightwatchers.com/pda/.