Health And Fitness Software, What
Should Be In It? Part 1
ByErik Pijcke
Let’s keep the answer simple; everything
that is related to your health.
The most important indicators for your state
of health can be measured though your vital
signs, like blood pressure, cholesterol level,
heart beat, body mass index etcetera. The
major input that influence these health indicators
are what and how much you eat and drink, smoke,
medication use, life style, daily activity
and air quality.
Beside our genetic disposition, we
are what we eat, drink and breathe.
A good health and fitness software program
should be able to capture the above mentioned
input and correlate the results with the
output, or health indicators. This way
you create a cause and effect system that
the user can analyze and consequently
take corrective measures and improve his
or her overall health.
The bigger picture teaches us that an
effective health and fitness software
program contains modules that can monitor
our food intake, record our body measurements
and vital signs. Furthermore it should
track our daily activities and convert
them into calories burned. Also it should
keep track of our medicine and supplement
intake and monitor our overall health
level. For the sport and bodybuilders
we need additional modules that can keep
track of our workout activities, sport
results and fitness tests
Let’s start with food intake.
Most of the time we eat together with
our family therefore a health and fitness
software program should never be restricted
to one user.
People tend to repeat the recipes they
cook and meals they prepare on a regular
interval. For most people this interval
is between 20 and 30 days. Furthermore
people tend to buy more or less the same
ingredients for their meals. For this
reason a fitness or diet program boosting
databases with thousands of food items
will be more of a hindrance than a benefit.
The reason that I say this is because
it will be very time consuming to pick
an ingredient for a recipe or meal plan
from a list of thousands of ingredients.
Look for a program that has the basic
ingredients to build your recipes and
allows you to add food items that are
specific to your taste.
A food’s nutrition facts change depending
on how it is conserved, processed or cooked.
For example a cup of canned spinach that
is cooked will have totally different
nutrition facts than a cup of fresh spinach.
Look for a program that can make a distinction
between these food properties.
The cost of buying special diet foods
can be a lot more (up to 2.5 times) than
what the average American spends on food.
It is a plus if a health and fitness software
program can keep track of the food cost
by recipe, meal and day. It is really
a bonus if the program can compare grocery
prices between shops and help you budget.
A recipe module is imperative to a good
health and fitness system. This is the
place where you can experiment and adjust
your recipes to your diet’s nutritional
fact limits. The recipe should calculate
its nutritional facts per portion depending
on the weight ratio of each ingredient
that has been added to the recipe. Naturally
you should be able to print the recipe
and see the total recipe cost and the
cost per portion. Having the ability of
adding recipe pictures is a plus.
You should also have the ability to create
multiple meal plans in the system. Maybe
you would like a separate plan for the
kids or baby. Or for a partner that has
a cholesterol problem, high blood pressure
or diabetes. Or you simply want to change
diets. These meal plans should repeat
over a certain amount of days. The timing
of the meals should be more then just
breakfast, lunch and dinner. Many diets
ask for many small recipe portions during
the day. The food items that you select
on the meal plan should come from the
ingredients as well as from the recipes.
For instance you can add a raw apple to
your meal plan, which is an ingredient
to make an apple sauce recipe. The apple
sauce recipe or the raw apple can each
be added to the meal plan
As you would expect, the software program
should be able to calculate the meal plan
cost and nutrition facts by day and for
the whole meal plan.
How are you going to keep track of what
you actually ate on a particular day and
how do you know how to stick exactly to
your plan? You do this by printing a meal
plan worksheet for a particular day and
you note the actual differences from the
plan.
We don’t have much time in today’s busy
society; therefore you should be able
to register the actual daily food consumption
in less then 30 seconds. A system that
forces you every day for every meal to
select your food items from a list of
thousands records is not going to make
it in 30 seconds. Only select a system
that automatically populates your meal
plan for that day and you only update
the actual differences from the plan.
Just adding your daily food intake to
a database is not going to benefit you.
It will create a "data cemetery", data
that is never examined. The food data
needs to be analyzed and correlated to
other types of data like your body measurements
or calories burned. Click on the calorie
analysis hyperlink to view an example.
The chart makes it very quickly clear
that the calorie intake line is under
the calories spent line and consequently
you will lose weight.
Next article I will talk about activity
calorie counting and the factors involved...
About The Author
© Erik Pijcke is founder and CEO of Pycke
Inc. He is the architect and developer
of Hythial Pro, an all-inclusive personal
health and fitness software program. Part
of this software program contains a comprehensive
calorie counter module. You can download
this program at http://www.hythial.com.
Hythial Pro - Health Diet Fitness Software
+ Free Online Recipe and Food Calorie
Counter
