Regain Control over Your Weight

very good
key review info
application features
  • Creates a personal diet plan for each user.
  • (3 more, see all...)

Have you ever imagined yourself with a wasp waist at your best friend's wedding? How about looking gorgeous in your swimming suit while walking on the beach this summer? Or simply being able to join your colleagues while playing tennis during your lunch break without sweating like hell and feeling exhausted after only five minutes of intense running?

Well, now you have a chance to see your dream come true, to live better and feel better despite the fact that you are not in the mood to condemn yourself to endless workouts or extreme diets. And I am not talking about a diet pill. Or about some sort of cheap commercial book or tutorial on how to lose weight while sleeping. I am not gonna do that because I myself have already tried a lot of those “miraculous” diets and I have discovered that there is no such thing.

There is no method out there that could guarantee you that it will make you instantly burn out the fat on your belly and that if you eat only low-fat, no-sugar-added or law-carb raw products you will have a firm, toned body in the long term, without having to experience the scarring “yo-yo” effect ever again. Moreover, I believe, that there is no dieting method that can boost your energy level. Most of the time they expose you to severe depression and, sooner or later, rather than killing for a piece of chocolate you will find yourself in the position to give up dieting, no matter what kind of diet you have chosen.

This is why, if you want to regain control over your body, you don’t need a “perfect” diet that imposes restrictions on you and makes you prone to depression. What you need is a small funny tool called the “Perfect Diet Tracker” that lets you juggle with your meals and exercise plan and invites you to eat whatever you want, the way that you want to, but to constantly keep an eye on the total amount of the calories that you ingest.

The Looks

The opening window surprises you with its professional look. The combination between the aquamarine subtitle bar that includes a short but effective call to action message and the apricot yellow logo depicting a stylized business man silhouette completed by the vintage red calendar, but most important, the matte navy informative bar right next to it, will be present in almost all the windows of the application. This adds a big plus to the aesthetic impression and hints at the consistency and the usability of the entire application.

The next pages are the so-called "setup pages," where you are asked to type in some basic data about your body (like height and current weight), your target weight, and eventually your daily exercising routine (or your activity level) in order to let the application calculate your BMI and offer you some pertinent recommendations. What is worth mentioning is that, on all those pages, right on the left side column, you will be able to see a progressively growing vertical menu including the pages that you have already visited. This is nice and comes in handy in case you want to quickly jump to one of the previous pages to edit it and to implicitly modify your profile.

Also, for those who might want to return just a step back, to quit the setup and directly enter the application or simply to logout and to return to the login page (because all the information is secured through a personal account and a password) there is a trio of buttons at the bottom of each page, serving exactly these three purposes.

After your BMI has been displayed you can choose between letting the Perfect Diet Tracker automatically calculate your daily calorie needs and indicate a wise calorie intake strategy or entering your own values, based on your target weight and the time you have at your disposal to reach it. Moreover, you can also indicate which info regarding the composition of your daily meals you want to be displayed on the main tracking screen. You can choose among: calories, carbs, proteins, fats, sodium, fibers, sugars or even saturated fats.

And finally, after you have completed the setup pages, you get to the main tracker's page: the page where you can return daily to enter the info regarding the aliments that you ate or you plan to eat and, if you wish, your daily exercising routine.

The Works

As already described in the previous section, the Perfect Diet Tracker starts wit collecting some data about you and the weight you want to reach. It does that in order to help you realize if your expectations are realistic and to prevent you from taking rush decisions regarding what you eat. Depending on what you choose (to manually manage your daily meals or to receive a bit of guidance in this regard) the application gives you the possibility to select from many different types of food and exercises the ones that suit you best.

Basically, you can plan your meals thoroughly by splitting the daily calorie intake into the following categories: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Supper, Snacks & Drinks and Other. The range of products and raw ingredients to choose from is impressively wide. For example, you can go from raw tomato with cottage cheese for Breakfast up to the “Caramel Frappuccino blended coffee with whipped cream, cinnamon and brown sugar” or I don’t know what other exquisite ingredient you would like to have in your coffee (just like you order it in a Starbucks coffee shop) for your Snacks & Drinks category.

And talking about categories, they are not meant to annoy you and force you to stick to a particular daily plan if you happened to press on the wrong ingredient or you have suddenly changed your mind and feel like eating soup, fish & chips and dessert at Breakfast and only strawberries at Lunch. No, on the contrary – you have full flexibility to move the products and ingredients to any category you want, and you can even pick the portion sizes that you feel more comfortable with or completely delete a recording.

The internal search engine is very good and the possibility to create your own data base with favorite ingredients and food combinations can also be very useful.

In conclusion, the nice and friendly Perfect Diet Tracker only calculates for you the numbers of calories of the things that you eat and lets you know when you have surpassed your calorie daily limit, in accordance with your target weight. Sounds frightening and somehow like a masochistic or communistic futile and obsolete auto-imposed restriction? Well it isn't. Sometimes control and discipline are good. And the possibility to balance your daily routine with a couple of minutes of aerobic, dancing, jogging, swimming or even washing windows (don't laugh – you can burn about 71 calories in only 15 minutes, which allows you to serenely enjoy two oatmeal cookies afterwards...) could become just the salt and pepper in your life.


The Good

The way the whole application is organized reveals a sharp mind behind it.  It is punctual and efficient and, even if it might give you the wrong impression that following such a calorie tracking system would transform you into a total geek or, worse, make you fell even more obsessed about your diet than you have ever been before, you will soon discover that it could save you a lot of headaches. More than that, it offers you the possibility to play with the things that you eat, build your own menu combinations, move the aliments from one category to another, make a list of favorites and discover new physical activities that fit you, which is both fun and helpful in building your self-confidence.

The Bad

Most people use to take decisions on the spot, based on their common sense. Only the idea of having a kind of personal blog or diary with what they eat would probably make them laugh. Besides, for those who don't have patience and want to see the results quickly such an application might seem too stuffed with too detailed information, redundant, and poor in concrete, draconic weight-loss methods. The main page, where you can insert your daily meals and exercises is a bit too small and sometimes you could find yourself in a situation where you simply can not add any other record because of lack of space. Besides, I personally think that, no matter how fun it might be to use such an application, spending almost $50 on it is a bit too much.

The Truth

Despite all the rumors or ironies that the usage of such an application might draw (especially for those who have never been worried about their weight) the Perfect Diet Tracker is a smart and comprehensive little tool that offers you a visually attractive GUI, a full collection of mouthwatering low-calorie meal suggestions and an effective management method of the things that you eat. Moreover, the statistics it can provide and the fact that it guides you every step of the way and it even pampers you with exercising ideas when you tend to overcrowd your meals with bad carbs are also a definite plus.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:

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user interface 5
features 4
ease of use 4
pricing / value 2


final rating 4
Editor's review
very good
 
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