As more and more people are overweight nowadays, how to lose weight and keep fit has become a hot issue all over the world. On diet? Exercise? Yes! If you’re overweight, that’s what you need to do. But do you know how much calorie you have taken in everyday’s meal? Or how much calorie will be burned off through different exercises? At that time, a professional, reasonable and efficient weight loss program is needed. There are two software for you to try, which are well designed and help you control weight and keep fit on your PC easily.
Perfect Diet Tracker (detailed review) and BigPicture Personal Fitness (detailed review) have a lot of similarity to a certain extent, such as create a personal diet plan for each user; select your own target weight loss or gain; monitor your calorific intake and nutritional profile, and so on. But there still exists some differences. Let’s take a look at that.
1. Interface
Perfect Diet Tracker has an intuitive and concise interface with lots of drop-down menus and clear icons for users to easily handle. In the left pane of the interface, there are six toolbars including the main functions, which are update results, view results, adjust targets, editing settings, switch user and log out. Users can seamlessly switch the different functions in the same window by clicking the toolbars.
The diary for recording diet and exercise takes almost the whole part of the interface. It is very informative and easy to refer to because it combines these two parts together. Only taking a glace at the diary you can maintain the condition of calorific intake and burning. (see figure 1)
figure 1
Compared with Perfect Diet Tracker, BigPicture Personal Fitness is a little bit different to use. The main functions are nearly divided into three segments, including My food, My exercise and Other tools. The picture below shows the segment of “My food”, which classify the meals for user to enter the content automatically. But unlike Perfect Diet Tracker, you can not combine food and exercise records in one window but have to open two or more windows to get the information one by one. (see figure 2)
figure 2
2. Layout
Perfect Diet Tracker has a clear and concise layout which provides user with useful information and suggestions. At the bottom of the diary window there is a progress box (see figure 3), showing the specific calorie condition. This section is divided into three graphs. From the first one you can see how much calorie you have consumed and remained, and the second one gives users a breakdown of nutritional profile, while the third one shows you the target nutritional profile. Meanwhile, it is easy to change the data of your target nutritional profile by clicking the small spanner icon in the right bottom of the graph. The graphs make a calorie comparison between what you have consumed and what your target requires, and it reminds you of which food you have to cut back to meet your goal.
figure 3
BigPicture Personal Fitness also has a detailed nutritional fact section. In the right pane of the food journal, there is a list about breakdown and content of calorie intake (see figure 4). It contains not only the amount of nutritive element content, but also lists the average diet of a period of time in the past which you can choose. The lists suggest the differences and progress you made from comparison of different period, which will let you realize how far to reach the goal. The disadvantage is that it does not list a remaining nutritional profile for users to have a more intuitive view about the calorie intake and select the right food to reach the target.
figure 4
Want to know the nutritional information of each meal? Of course you can. Click the food you enter and there will be a window popping up. Select the “show nutritional information” button and with a drop down menus you can take a look (see figure 5). BigPicture Personal Fitness has a more extensive information box of each meal. Only by double clicking the food you enter, you can see a popup window showing the information (see figure 6). From the detailed information you may handle which food will affect your diet most and which food you can take more.
figure 5
figure 6
3. Function
In Perfect Diet Tracker, right click the items of each meal or exercise will give you more options to deal with them. For example, you can copy the item to the current day’s diary if you have consumed the same food as that day. It helps you save more time in entering the same meal and exercise. There are another more options providing you with convenience such as duplicate, copy entries to other users or create a group from the selected entries. Just select the items you want, and “right click” it, you will find more. This function is not supported by BigPicture Personal Fitness.
“Search” items are a little bit similar but there are still some differences. With a large database of food and exercise items (now over 35,000), Perfect Diet Tracker supports alphabetical search for food. The program collects almost all food in the world, especially the European food. Meanwhile, the internet search function has been enhanced. Once you enter more than three letters into the search box, it will automatically search from the database. If it can’t be found, the program will perform and expand internet search for what you want. If the product still can’t be found in the internet, then you need to add it to the database. BigPicture Personal Fitness also has the same search system, but it is a pity that the program does not support internet search, which means that you have to add new food name by yourself if what you ate can not be found in the database. As far as I try, actually I find that the database in Perfect Diet Tracker is larger than BigPicture Personal Fitness.
4. Specification comparison
After the comparison, you may get the information about which program is suitable for you. You’d better choose one of them to start your weight loss plan. Just enjoy your diet, do sensible exercises, and build up a perfect life style provided by the software. I would like to recommend you to download both of them to have a try, and then find out the favorite one. The program is just like your companion helping you schedule the plan and motivate you to complete it.
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