Calories - Keep Track of Your Daily Food

very good
key review info
application features
  • Extremely easy to use.
  • (5 more, see all...)

In the recent years, overweight and obesity have spread all around the world. Due to the risk of chronic and cardiovascular diseases, overweight has become a global problem and scientists struggle to find efficient solutions to keep it under control. Until now, the best results are still the result of regular physical activity and a healthy diet. Calories is a small software tool that will help you keep track of the food you eat every day, also providing useful information about the nutrients in it. You have no excuse for not eating healthy now.

The Looks

The user interface of Calories is made up of a single window that gives you access to the program's entire functionality. Instead of providing the user with a lot of options, the program is strictly focused on its main function, that of organizing your daily diet and giving only the necessary food information. Thus, there are only a few actions that you can perform, which makes Calories very easy to use.

The Works

Calories is a professional software utility that incorporates the USDA Food Database for Dietary Study. All the food information including the nutrient quantities is taken from a scientific, reliable source. The food database includes over 6900 foods; just to give you an idea, you can find 56 types of pizza in the application and 161 results if you search the word 'sandwich' in the database.

From the toolbar, you can select the display mode that you prefer: the Diet mode lets you add foods to your diet and view the nutrient list for each item, while the Report mode gives you an overview of your diet for the selected day, week, month or year.

Basically, if you want to manage your diet using Calories, all you need to do is search for the food you want to eat, select the appropriate item from the result list and press 'Enter', the food will be added to your currently selected meal. In the result list, Calories displays the amount of calories per 100g of every product. The search function also works from the Report mode, changing the display automatically to the Diet mode.

If, by any chance, you don't find the right food in the database, Calories allows you to create your custom food type from the selected one. Just choose a product that is close to the one you want to create, and then select 'Make Food From Selection' from the Action menu. Calories will open a new window where you can name the custom food, select the appropriate portions for it and modify the nutrient quantities accordingly. Although you can change the quantities easily, just by double clicking the field, I couldn't find a way to modify the weight units, which seem to be set by default for each nutrient.

You can set a maximum amount of calories for your daily meals and Calories lets you know when that level has been reached by displaying the overrun quantities colored in red in the daily nutrition bar. This bar provides you with an overall view on the quantities of proteins, carbs and fat of the current meal and also shows the number of calories remaining for you to achieve your daily goal.

The best feature of Calories, in my opinion, is the Nutrient list: for every food in your meal, you can see a list of the nutrients contained in it with the appropriate quantities. With this list, you can easily record and monitor the daily amount of Calcium, Fats, Sugars and vitamins, to name just a few of the nutrients that are important for our health. For example, a simple cheese sandwich contains 23 mg of Calcium, 28 g of Carbohydrates, 2 mg of Iron, 174 mg of Phosphorus, 748 mg of Sodium and small quantities of several other nutrients.

The Calories development team is active and constantly releasing new updates to ensure the  application behaves correctly and that it includes all the needed features. So, if you find any bug or just want some new features to be added to the program, just contact the developers and you will help Calories become even better.


The Good

Calories helps you find out how healthy your food is and also lets you plan your entire meals for the next days. It's incredibly easy to use and intuitive and it's a great addition to your software library.

The Bad

Although Calories is meant to be a simple application that provides only the strictly necessary features, adding some options to customize the program's interface may improve the user experience. I also think it would be a good idea to place the 'Make Food From Selection' action in a contextual menu for each item in the food list.

The Truth

Calories is definitely worth a try, especially since the demo version lets you enjoy the full functionality of the software, with the only limitation that you can only add 100 foods to your diet. Regardless of the type of diet you want, Calories will help you stay healthy by giving you the possibility to analyze the food you eat and make the appropriate changes in your daily nutrition habits.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:

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user interface 4
features 4
ease of use 5
pricing / value 4


final rating 4
Editor's review
very good
 
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