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Eating healthier food and losing weight are great goals for most of us--and also very difficult for most of us. DietPower is designed to help balance your diet by giving regular feedback on your dietary and exercise habits. First, tell DietPower how much you want to weigh and when. Every time you record your weight, the program designs a calorie budget for you. Select from the 21,000+ foods in the database (or add your own), and DietPower shows the effect of these foods on your weight goals and your balance of 33 nutrients. The program also offers calorie expenditures for over a thousand kinds of activity, from accordion playing to yoga teaching. (And if the counts here are accurate, it's much more slimming to attend a yoga class than it is to teach one.) If you stay within your calorie budget and faithfully record your meals and exercise, DietPower can help you to reach your desired weight on your target date.

Version 4.0 introduced Nutrition Quotient, which charts your consumption of various nutrients--fat, cholesterol, carbs, vitamins, and so forth--and tells you if your intake is ahead or behind. Since then, Smart Seconds has joined NQ as a way to improve your eating throughout the day. If you've eaten anything today that fits in to the "some is good, more is better" profile for your goal, DietPower highlights it in bright green. Less useful--but still beneficial--Helper Foods get a light green. Taken together, Smart Seconds and NQ give a good thumbnail of your day's successes and mistakes and lets you tip the balance in the right direction. The fudge I ate today gets an NQ of -9; the skim milk gets a 17. No surprise that Smart Seconds tells me to drink more skim milk, and that another slice of wheat bread wouldn't hurt me.

DietPower is easy to use from the get-go, but you'll save time overall--and get more out of this deep program--if you avail yourself of the tutorials sprinkled throughout. Education and discipline are the keys to weight loss and good nutrition, and DietPower helps in both categories.

--Laura Blackwell