For Nerds Like Me (My New Toy!)

So I met with my independent nutritionist today and the meeting went really well. It was a good sign that upon entering her little office I noticed dozens of hippo figurines, which I coincidentally collected during most my childhood.  :)  She advised me to increase my protein intake and showed me a good balance between carbs and protein.  (We settled on 30g carbs to about 14 to 21g protein, in line with the carb requirements of my diabetic program.) During our appointment she used a standalone program on her laptop to throw together food ingredients and automatically calculate nutrient totals - something I had been doing manually on my super dooper spreadsheet.  So of course the first thing I did when I got home was download a trial version of the software from www.calorieking.com . I've been playing with it all evening and I have to say, this nerd is in luv. <3

To give you some reference, here's a snapshot of one portion of my spreadsheet:












Now times that by 5 meals a day with target totals on the bottom for 7 days.  My spreadsheet took me about 2 weeks to complete and it still needed work to finish balancing it out perfectly.  Enter CalorieKing's program.

The first cool thing about this program is that you can set your own nutritional targets.  So while it's a great tool for people trying to lose weight, I was able to easily customize it for my diabetic pregnancy by setting my own targets:



























You can then choose items from the database and drag and drop to build your meals and snacks. You can adjust servings as you drop the items to match what you're eating:





You can see right away the totals of the nutrients you're interested in. So as I'm recreating my meal plans, I can check my protein counts and adjust my ingredients as needed.

















Progress bars at the bottom help you see how close you are getting to your goals and if you're particularly low on any nutrient.













I am so happy with how much easier this is than the spreadsheet I made myself.  While it was a great learning experience, it was so time consuming and the idea of putting together more meal plans is very daunting.  With the CalorieKing software, I can put together meals super quickly and tweak what I'm eating to match my goals without having to re-crunch the numbers all the time.  At $45 to buy it's a bit of a steep purchase for me, but if I end up using it as much as I predict I will during my free 7 day trial, I'll most likely make this my next software purchase.  I highly recommend at least a test drive for any others out there who are nerds like me.