What Is DietPower

What Is DietPower?

Weight Loss that Can't Fail
You've seen claims like this before. In DietPower's case, however, the claim is quite true - not because of any magical ingredient, but because our software understands math and physics. Most weight-control programs assume you have an average metabolic rate (calories required to maintain your weight) - typically 2000 calories per day. Your rate may differ, however. It may also fluctuate over days or weeks. Even if it's only 10 percent off the truth, a "maintenance" diet designed by one of those programs will lead you to gain or lose more than 20 pounds a year.

To get around this problem, DietPower monitors your true metabolic rate by comparing your weight changes with the foods you've eaten and the exercise you've logged. If the rate goes up or down, the program adjusts your calorie budget by just enough to cancel the difference. It does so daily. This self-correcting system guarantees that if you consistently record your meals and exercise and live within your budget, you will reach your goal on schedule.

You have to supply the perseverance, of course. But most people who use DietPower say it's surprising how seldom they feel hungry. That's because they can see which foods are healthful, yet filling. The program teaches good nutrition effortlessly.

Although it's supremely effective by itself, DietPower can be used with other weight-loss regimens, either to increase their power or to find out quickly whether you need to switch. The program works with :

·	Weight Watchers

·	Low-carb diets

·	Ornish Plan

·	Jenny Craig

·	Nutri/Systems

·	Protein Power

·	Prism programs

·	Atkins Diet

Zone Diet

·	American Heart Association Diet

·	Pritikin Diet

Slim-Fast

·	Mediterranean Diet

·	TOPS programs

You can also use DietPower with Meridia, Xenical, and other weight-loss drugs. It maximizes any weight-loss system, because it exploits a feature that every diet must have.

What All Diets Have in Common
The human body, for all its wonderful complexity, acts much like a machine. It burns fuel (food and drink) to do work (moving and thinking). The fuel must be correctly formulated (nutritionally balanced), or the machine will run poorly. The mileage (metabolic rate) depends on the year, make, and model (age, sex, and individual). Unlike ordinary machines, however, your body can accept a huge surplus of fuel by converting it into an onboard energy reserve known as fat. All weight-loss diets work by making your body burn off this reserve instead of adding to it. To lose weight, you need to expend more calories (the basic unit of energy) than you eat. There can be no exception to this rule: it's an immutable law of physics.

Diets differ only in how they tune the engine. Low-fat diets, for example, substitute a leaner fuel - mostly vegetables, fruits, and grains, which contain only half as many calories as fatty foods do. The Zone Diet uses a different scheme: keeping blood-sugar at a level that makes the engine burn "hotter." (Exercise does the same thing by putting a heavier load on the engine.) A few diets (and most diet drugs) short-circuit the microchips that tell the engine when to demand more fuel - the equivalent of driving with the CHECK ENGINE light on.

Meet the Governor
No diet can succeed if you shed the pounds too fast. (Most experts recommend losing no more than two pounds a week). When you starve the engine of fuel, it responds by giving itself a tuneup that increases fuel efficiency. (Don't you wish your car would do that?) Suddenly, even the skimpiest meals begin feeding your fat reserves. If you respond by cutting back further, you may lose the weight again—but then your body gives itself a better tuneup that only makes matters worse. You become a "yo-yo dieter." What you need is a "governor" that enables you to keep the engine running at a perfectly even efficiency. That's what DietPower is. It shows you exactly how fast your body is using fuel, so that you can put in the right amount at the right time to keep the fat reserve shrinking at a constant rate. By canceling out the fluctuations, it keeps you precisely on target.

In short, DietPower succeeds by mastering a truth that other programs overlook. Where they assume everyone is the same, DietPower treats you as the individual you really are.

The Right Octane
Your metabolic rate isn't the only thing DietPower monitors. It also watches your fuel mixture. By clicking the program's Nutrient History button (shown at right), you can check your consumption of 33 important nutrients for the past week, month, quarter, or year. You can also see how your nutrient balance will be affected by any food choice. You can even make sure you're drinking enough water.

Here are the nutrients that DietPower monitors:

·	Calories Protein Folate

·	Fat, total Vitamin A Vitamin B12

·	Fat, saturated Vitamin C Pantothenic acid

·	Fat, polyunsaturated Calcium Phosphorus

·	Fat, monounsaturated Iron Magnesium

·	Cholesterol Vitamin D Zinc

·	Sodium Vitamin E Copper

·	Potassium Thiamin Manganese

·	Carbohydrate, total Niacin Selenium

·	Fiber, dietary Riboflavin Water

·	Sugars Vitamin B6 Alcohol

Examples of Use
Susan keeps her eye on the Nutrient History when planning meals. Because she has high blood pressure, her doctor wants her to cut down on salt and increase her intake of potassium. She usually decides on dinner just before she leaves work, using the copy of DietPower on her office computer. (She carries her records back home on a "travel disk.") Looking at her Nutrient History one afternoon, Susan discovers that the chicken bouillon she had with lunch has already blown her sodium limit for the day. Meanwhile, she's still behind in her potassium intake - it's been low for a week. She decides to do something about this. Using a lightning-fast search of DietPower's 11,000-food dictionary, Susan pulls up a list of items that are both low in sodium and high in potassium. Voilà! The best choice for dinner tonight is grilled salmon with a baked potato—and for dessert, fresh cantaloupe.

This nutrient-tracking feature comes in handy in myriad ways:

·	Bob is a semi-vegetarian. He uses DietPower to make sure he gets enough vitamin B12—a nutrient often lacking in meatless diets.

·	Marie, who's pregnant, has raised her folate intake to help prevent birth defects. She's also using the software for weight gain—something DietPower is equally good at. When she visits Dr. Lehman, she takes along a printout of her weight and nutrient histories.

·	Fred, worried about colon cancer, uses DietPower to increase his fiber intake.

·	Joanna plans meals high in calcium, to avoid osteoporosis.Joanna's son, Garrett, uses the program to practice "carbohydrate loading" for marathon runs. (DietPower lets as many as nine people in a household use the program concurrently.)

·	Neil learned about DietPower from his cardiac-rehabilitation specialist, who recommended the program for losing weight while reducing fat and cholesterol intake.

Help That's Helpful :
Most of the nutrition secrets described above are covered in DietPower's 100,000-word Help system, which you can open by clicking the button shown at right. DietPower's help is among the world's clearest and easiest to read. ("Finally—instructions the average person can understand," said one reviewer.) Written by a top editor of Reader's Digest, the system offers advice on what you're doing right now, instead of forcing you to search for it yourself. It also offers animated demos of key features. The Help system can also make you an expert on everything from Alcohol to Zinc. Here's a taste of what you can learn from it :

·	How many beers a day for a "moderate" drinker?

·	The "good" fat that protects you against heart disease

·	Why eating sardines can help you adapt to cold weather

·	The nutrient that instantly increases physical strength

·	Which vitamin can improve night vision

·	How to tell if you're officially "obese"

·	What to eat if your fingertips tingle

·	Why vitamin D can harm people who live in Arizona

·	If you meet a man with beriberi, should you offer him a drink?

DietPower can instantly reveal the nutrients in any of its thousands of foods - or in any recipe you create from them. You can find any food or recipe in seconds, simply by typing a few letters of its name. (If it has two names, you'll find it under both - even if you misspell it.) You can view its nutrient profile in either pie- or bar-chart form.

Creating recipes is a snap. Just drag and drop the ingredients into the Recipe Box, type in the directions, and give your concoction a name. Your recipes are listed right along with the other foods, ready for you to check their nutrients or make printouts for friends. Each printout folds into a 4"-by-6" recipe card.

If you happen across a food that's not in DietPower's dictionary, you can add the food to the dictionary by entering nutrition facts from the label.

DietPower awards extra calories for exercise, which you record by clicking the Exercise Log button shown at right. The program knows the "burn rates" of more than 200 activities, from conventional aerobics (walking, running, bicycling, swimming) to competitive sports (tennis, basketball, golf), to martial arts (boxing, fencing, karate), to exercise machines (stair climbers, exercycles), to occupations (bricklaying, carpentry), to house- and yardwork (mowing, wood chopping, laundry), to leisure pursuits such as skiing, dancing, mountain climbing, scuba diving - and more.

Every burn rate is automatically adjusted to your current body weight. A 150-pound runner, for example, won't burn as many calories as a 185-pound runner. If exercise raises your metabolic rate, DietPower will notice this and increase your calorie budget accordingly. Similarly, if your workouts slow your weight loss by increasing your muscle mass, the program will decrease your budget to keep your weight on track. (You may want to adjust your goal weight in that case, however. A lean and fit 170-pounder will look better, feel better, and be healthier than an out-of-shape 160-pounder of the same height.)

Other Features :

·	Use it to gain weight. The program can take you in either direction. (It's also excellent for maintaining your weight once you reach your goal.)

·	Eat only the foods you like. DietPower never dictates your menus—it lets you decide.

·	See a daily graph of your progress, complete with your goal weight and target date, all the actual weights you've logged, and a projected weight based on your recent eating and exercise.

·	Graph your intake of any nutrient (cholesterol or saturated fat, for example)—or any other variable that you set up yourself.

·	Get an alert from the WaterMinder™ anytime you aren't drinking enough water.

·	Customize the program for hypertension and other special health concerns.

·	Sort all of the food dictionary's 21,000 entries by their content of any nutrient, using the PowerFoods function.

·	Get a piece of motivational reading every time you log on, tailored to your current situation.

·	Plan your week, month, or year with DietPower's electronic calendar and appointment book.

·	Print your diet plan, nutrient profile, or any other report—or output it to a disk file for use with other software.

·	Anyone at least 15 years old, between four feet and seven feet tall, and weighing at least 75 but no more than 499 pounds. (People outside those ranges often have nutritional needs that the program doesn't cover.)

·	Up to nine different people on the same copy - provided all live in the same household.

System Requirements
DietPower works on any computer running Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, ME, or XP. The program performs best, however, on machines of the Pentium class or higher with at least 8 megabytes of RAM. (Older computers can handle DietPower, but startups and food searches may take longer than desired.) You will also need at least 28 megabytes of disk space to install DietPower on your hard drive. (If you download the program instead of getting it on a CD-ROM, you'll need 38 megabytes -- but this will shrink to 28 megabytes if you erase the download after installation.)

Prices
The Personal Edition of DietPower, which serves as many as nine users within a household, costs $49.99 when downloaded or $54.99 when delivered on a CD-ROM. Other editions cost more:
The Consultant's Edition allows a doctor, nutritionist, personal trainer, or other practitioner to prescribe single-user copies to patients or clients, and to read their histories from "travel disks" that they bring to office visits. Price: $250 plus the cost of each client's copy. (Phone 800-852-8446* for details.)

The Large Group Edition can handle dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of users. (They can't access the program simultaneously, however, unless it is installed on more than one computer.) This version is ideal for health clubs, schools, corporate wellness programs, and similar settings. Price: $500 plus a license fee that depends on the number of computers on which the program is installed.