14 DAY TRIAL // Some say that we are what we eat. Some will argue that we should not spend too much time thinking what we eat, because this will end up turning into an obsession. Instead, the latter are more in favor of eating what you feel like, when you feel like. In their opinion this is a good method for remaining serene, balanced and happy. Others will say that, on the contrary you can not be happy if you are overweight and you practice no sport whatsoever.
For those people, having their daily 60 minutes for running or going to the gym is as important as breathing.
Now, who is right and who is wrong? What is the recipe for staying healthy, beautiful but also lighthearted and energetic for years?
Well, I am afraid nobody will be able to give you a complete answer to this question. All you can get are some advices or some tips that worked for others but it is up to you to find what fits you best.
You will probably say that you have read a lot on this theme and that you still have not found a diet or an exercise routine that could be kept on long term with no side effects. But there is nothing to be ashamed or furious about: such a combination is hard to find. Sometimes it takes years to find out the exact number of calories you should eat and burn for your type of body and your physical activity level.
Luckily, even if you are still experimenting with all sorts of diets and you go walking or jogging once a month, with little, but specialized, tools like Foodurama you can, at least, keep track of calories and try to find the physical activity that suits best your current needs and schedule.
The Looks
The main window is divided in three areas. The first one looks like a table and it is placed on the top, left side corner of the main window. The second one is displayed under this table and is the place where all sorts of graphics and statistics will be displayed. Finally, the third one is basically a a right sidebar, that will be modified dynamically.
Above these three areas, right under the application's name, you can see a short bar with arrows that lets you navigate through the days of the week and a small drop-down list with options for quickly choosing the part of the body you want to focus on.
In the same line, but on the top right corner of the toolbar you have three buttons for quickly adding a new dish, a new activity or a new state.
But let us have a closer look on the most important elements of the main window.
In the table area you will see almost nothing at the very beginning. Before adding any entry you will see only a small pop-up window with an explanatory text regarding the two methods that can be used for populating the table.
In comparison with this area, the one displayed on the bottom of the page is abundant in information. First of all it provides you four tabs that, when clicked take you to new window. The names of the tabs are as following: Intake, Evaluation, Suggestion and Nutrients.
Furthermore, in accordance with the tab that you are currently in, you can see detailed info regarding the name of the nutrients found in your meal plans, the recommended values per day and their overall distribution per week.
The sidebar also summarizes, in separate tabs, the recent included dishes, the recent foods and your favorites, respectively.
The bottom part of the sidebar is dedicated to browsing the foods by category. Finally, if you can not find the type of dish you are interested in by navigating through the available categories you can use the search bar, right on the bottom of the sidebar, to help you find anything you wish. The Works
You can start creating new diet plans by populating the calendar area, placed on the top of the main window. The two main methods that can be used for adding a new entry are: by using the buttons under the title window or by double clicking on the day and the time you want to customize.
In other words, you can add the food that you plan to eat per day and per meal type. For instance, if you plan to start your monday morning with a breakfast full of energy-boasting cereals, a coffee and an orange juice simply hit the Breakfast cell, on the Monday column and start typing the first letters of any ingredient you want to include in your meal.
Another method for adding an item to your breakfast is to type the name of the brand that produces your favorite type of cereals in the cell. The app will find its complete name and it will assign it to your meal plan.
The application will do the rest: it will come up with a whole list of related suggestions and it will also keep track of the calories. You can use this method with any other type of meal or day of the week.
If you are undecided, you can use the search field provided in the small window that opens when you want to create a new entry. When you type a keyword in this search field, the application will browse the whole data base of ingredients and will return all the entries that include the respective keyword. To customize your plan even further you can change your status. In the contextual menu you are offered three special conditions: Nursing, Pregnancy, Quit Smoking. You should not underestimate the importance of this step in case you are pregnant or you have any other type of nutritional diseases that require a special treatment and ask you to obey some rules or restrictions.
When you are done with the planning or even while you are still working on the draft plan you can have a quick look at the lines displayed in the sidebar. Here you will see a list with the recently added foods. This can help you realize which items you tend to include too often and which of them only rarely, and it will enable you to balance a little the calories and nutrients intake.
Also for getting a quick overview of the items included in a meal plan you can mouse over the table's cells. Every time you stop for a second over a cell you will see in a blue pop-up the complete names of the ingredients or of the products included in the respective meal. Please note though, that this applies only for a selected meal.
Now, if you want to analyze a bit your meal plans use the statistics displayed on the bottom of the page. Here you can see the dishes and the foods included in your diet analyzed from the nutrients point of view. To be more exact, here you can see at a glance the number of proteins, carbs, lipids, fibers, sugars as well as the vitamins and the minerals included in your meals.
After a more superficial or in-depth analysis of this data you can go to the Evaluation tab. Here you have the option to add different types if diagrams. For example you can add a diagram for your Body Fat, Weight, Calories from sports, Training Duration, Water, Protein, Panthothenic acid, Lactose, Maltose, Alcohol, etc.
But even if the palette of options could look quite inviting at first, and you will feel tempted to try them all, I would not advice you to do that. When you add to many diagrams at a time the view will become clumsy and instead of understanding more about what is wrong and what is right with your diet you will probably end up giving up analyzing anything.
Anyway, when you feel like switching the view you can go to the Suggestions page, where you will have the option of visually analyzing a bunch of products through some indicators that change their status dynamically.
Ok, now, that you have understood a little bit more things about the nutrients and the number of calories included in the food that you like to eat, you would probably want to adjust the imbalances and to neutralize or correct a bit the effects of the extra calories through some physical activities.
To include in your daily routine some exercises you can use the New Activity option provided both in the contextual menu and as a quick access button on the top right corner of the main window.
In the Sports window you will find lots of activities with details about the number of calories you can burn in 60 minutes of moderate effort. You can add as many activities as you want (or you feel you can handle) to every single day. If you do not find anything that suits your wishes or you simply want to edit the activities, you can do that by using the editing options provided by the Entries tab, in the main menu.
Moreover, the sports list is browsable and can by easily ordered by different criteria as, for instance. the number of calories burned per kg per hour, the energy consumed by an 80 kg person per hour or the burnt energy per hour for you.
Another view that I personally find useful is the one provided by the Meal Distribution window. Here you will have the option to visualize and to edit the start time, the end time as well as the calories you want to be attached to a certain meal type, as a percentage.
For example you can choose to take your breakfast between 6:00 AM and 8:00 AM, your lunch between 12:00 PM and 2:00 PM and your dinner between 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM but also to split the calories intake among the three meals as following: 25%, 50% and 25%, respectively.
What I find particularly cute about this window is that the meals' order is customizable and, if you change. for instance, the start time for dinner at an earlier point than the start time for breakfast the two meal types will change places. As a result you can start your day with dinner and apparently end it with breakfast. Cute, isn't it? Ok, enough with the giggling. Let us move on to another thought-provoking evaluation window: the nutrition preferences and the energy distribution related one.
Here you can also see an expandable list with the main groups of nutrients and a bar with percentages. Use it, if you want to better understand how many types of fat, fatty acids and waxes are included in your daily meals.
In this window you are provided with a Standard Nutrition-Set but you can create new sets and organize the elements in the way that you like.
Finally, when considering designing your own exercise plan you should take into consideration the PAL Settings, where PAL stands for Personal Activity Level and aims to help you visually evaluate the intensity of your daily physical activities on a scroll bar.
In case you still need to customize your planning, check the Preferences window. Here you will find options for changing the day and the hour when your working week starts, your favorite units of measure as well as the colors used for highlighting the dishes, the activities or the conditions.
The Good
You can add as many diagrams as you wish. This will help you analyze the food included in your meal plan and its effects on your body from different points of view. But, most important, this multitude of evaluation options will help you quickly spot the imbalances due to the visual representation of the facts.
For some foods or nutrients you get a blue info bullet that, when clicked, drives you to a page with detailed information about the respective item, sometimes even on pages published on Wikipedia.
The Bad
Also, the names of the diagrams that can be added in the Evaluation tab, on the bottom side of the main window, are not so self-explanatory. Even if I am aware of the fact that, when choosing the names, the developers have probably thought of finding short words, the names and the roles of the diagrams are not always intuitive and easy to understand at a glance.
The Truth
The Foods Library included in Foodurama is comprehensive, browsable and editable. Moreover, Foodurama helps you build hierarchies, keep track of calories and evaluate your daily nutrients intake.
Furthermore, it provides you the possibility to take into consideration some special conditions (even if not to many) and to adjust your plan accordingly. For these reasons, Foodurama can definitely help you be more organized and aware of what you are eating and even to discover why you keep gaining weight while being on a strict, self-imposed diet.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
