Tracking Your Diet On A Mac Is Oh So Much Fun. Not.

I’m 30 pounds overweight, but don’t mourn for me. I’m also eight months pregnant. Now you can mourn.

In just a few months I will need the perfect diet. Can my Mac help me find a diet and stick to it? Why doesn’t iLife ‘08 have an iDiet or iFood utility?

I gained about 30 pounds with my first baby, and promptly lost most of it chasing her around the house the first year, before my husband and I figured out what caused pregnancy, it happened again.

So did the 30 pound weight gain. I eat everything that comes with a lid or that can be opened, box, bag, or can. For me, the perfect diet starts with Haagen-Dasz and ends with something from the deli, preferably with pickles.

Is it possible to have a perfect diet and be 16 months pregnant? Ok, I’m not that far along, but it feels like it. Knowing that it’ll be tougher to get back in shape and reduce myself to the lean and taut figure my husband loves, I turned to my Mac to find the perfect diet utility.

Guess what? I found Perfect Diet Tracker. I’m not so much sure that tracking my diet is the best way to lose unwanted pounds, besides childbirth itself, but the alternative is to use MacGourmet instead. I love MacGourmet but it’s not conducive to weight loss. Gain? Yes. Loss? No.

Perfect Diet Tracker is a nifty Mac and Windows utility that is easy to use. That’s important. If it requires effort, I don’t really need it, because with two kids wandering the house all the time, effort and learning curve are not on the daily do list.

The trick to maintaining a good diet is to monitor what you eat, then make adjustments. A one pound bag of Lay’s potato chips, the kind with sunflower oil and salt and nothing else, does not a good diet make, so I made the adjustment. Now there’s a sale on Lay’s. Go figure.

Perfect Diet Tracker lets you monitor caloric intake, sets up a nutritional profile, and allows you to set a target weight loss. It even comes with a nutritional profile which you can modify. That’s especially handy if you don’t like the profile and there’s a sale on Lay’s potato chips.

Remember the trick? Tracking. It’s important to use Perfect Diet Tracker to track all you eat, by serving size, so caloric intake can be monitored. PDT has a built-in database of over 7,000 foods, most of which I’ve eaten in the past week, so tracking calories is easy.

PDT is very simple Mac utility. Basically, enter what you eat. Then, exercise a little will power, reduce portions or types of foods to reduce calories, and you can lose a couple of pounds a week. Or, don’t get pregnant. That works, too, but isn’t tracked by PDT.

Other benefits include the ability to track not only your daily progress, but your nutrition. PDT even shows you which foods are good, which are not, which you need more of, which you need less of. Data entry is simple.

Once you have a week or two of information, you’ll see some colorful pie charts that help plot your progress. Why do they have to be “pie” charts? What’s wrong with line charts? “Pie” just creates undue temptation.

I do have a couple of beefs with PDT. Well, complaints. Beef is what’s for dinner. PDT does not track the time of day you eat, or the actual products you eat. All cookies are not created equal.

Still, tracking the whole day gives you an opportunity to skip two or three in-between meals to reduce calories, and, over time, that reduces weight. Giving birth does that, too.

Other features of note include printing reports, an international food database, and a seven day free trial, which is more than enough time to decide if going digital really applies to diet and exercise.

Perfect Diet Tracker handles multiple users, so you can plop your less-than-svelt spouse into PDT and make them go through the same level of suffering weight control you use.