Dear Food Diary: I Left You for Vivonic

So I dutifully started doing what all the magazines and diet experts say to do: Keep a food diary. I created memos in my Palm, jotting down the toast at breakfast, the salad at lunch, even the nugget of chocolate in the afternoon.

But what a chore to figure calories. I have to give up doughnuts, motivate myself to sweat and do math? Please.

Enter the Vivonic Fitness Planner. This $50 program, compatible with Palm OS hand-held devices, calculates calories gobbled and burned as users log what they eat and do. It's a program that brings automation and portability to the war on fat.

The Vivonic Fitness Planner is no panacea. It takes time to customize, and its database of foods is limited, meaning you will have to spend a fair amount of time entering information on foods you actually eat--whether they're Krispy Kreme doughnuts and In-N-Out burgers or Dannon Light 'n Fit yogurt and fresh soybeans.

But who said losing weight would be easy?

I found the best price on the full-version Fitness Planner at Amazon.com ($39.99, about $10 less than the suggested retail price). For would-be users without a Palm, Handspring or other personal digital assistant, Vivonic sells its own hand-held unit with the software for $199.99. It also sells a $39.99 program just for Windows-based PCs (no Mac version), but obviously, you don't get portability.

If you just want to test the program, you can download a free five-day trial version on Vivonic's site (http://www.vivonic.com).

The trial version has a drawback, though: You can't enter customized information on foods not included in the program's built-in database. I couldn't log that serving of Trader Joe's veggie sticks or that Luna LemonZest bar. So I just picked similar items--with a similar calorie count--to stay honest.

For nutrition and exercise newbies--and even those who've been around the diet block a few times--Vivonic includes nutrition and fitness advice that can be read on the PC. The exercise section not only explains how to do, say, a leg press, it shows how in a click-and-view demonstration.

Loading the Palm-compatible software onto my PC was easy. Ditto filling out the questionnaire on my vital statistics and goals.

Based on my answers, Vivonic suggested a daily calorie maximum--and within that, what proportions should come from carbohydrates, fats and proteins. I could modify the plan--adjusting for, say, more protein and less fat.

The program also created an exercise plan that included a strength-training circuit and cardiovascular exercise. But because I already had a plan, I deleted some of Vivonic's suggestions, replacing them with my iron-pumping routine and aerobics schedule.

The food and exercise journal is easy to navigate. Each day shows tabs for breakfast, lunch, dinner and exercise. When you tap into a meal, you can add a food (or a customized meal). When you tap into the exercise log, you can check off the planned activity or add a new one. And you can easily remove an item if needed.

Adding food or exercise to the log means tapping through categories and sub-categories to get to specific items. (I often found myself using the search function, though, not always knowing which category to pick.)

In addition to such general groups as beverages, meats and breads, the program also includes restaurant meals and fast-food meals. So the database has such specific items as brewed tea (2 calories), English muffin (130), Kung Pao chicken (431 for 1 cup) and a Burger King double whopper with cheese (960).

The defaults on a few foods are strange, though, rendering some of them unusable. For example, turkey burgers aren't in the database. Ground turkey was the closest I could find. But when I tried to specify an amount, I was limited to putting a number next to "each"--how big is an "each"? An ounce? A cup? A patty? A whole bird?

As you add food to the journal, Vivonic keeps a running count of calories, alongside the target maximum. There's also a button for reports on calories expended during exercise and nutrition (dissecting what you've eaten into protein, carbs, fats, fiber, specific vitamins).

After a week or so of using Vivonic, I e-mailed customer support and suggested adding certain foods to the database--fresh soybeans, fresh tuna (the database has only the canned stuff) and Luna bars, among them. I got a prompt reply thanking me ("Great idea!") and reminding me that I could add prepackaged foods to the database and copy the nutrition information off the labels.

That was easy to do but tedious (think data entry). And when it came to filling out amounts for vitamins and minerals, I had to leave them at a highly inaccurate "0." Vivonic asks for amounts in milligrams, whereas most food labels have them listed as a percentage of the recommended daily allowance.