Managing your weight, whether you are trying to lose, gain, maintain or need to monitor and limit your consumption of sodium, sugar, saturated fats or cholesterol, is no easy task. Watching what you eat is not enough; you have to exercise! Wouldn't it be great to have a diet buddy or better yet to have your own personal food coach and trainer? Well CalorieKing's Nutrition and Exercise Manager provides a software version of that coach and trainer for Mac, Windows and Palm OS.

CalorieKing provides a well-written and comprehensive manual with good screenshots. There is also a Getting Started overview if you don't want to wade through the manual.

Installation and setup are very easy even for new computer users. When you use the program for the first time it walks you through a Personal Profile questionnaire to gather basic information about you in order to determine the best nutrition and exercise plan for you to follow. The program will track up to five [5] separate users.

Once the program has your statistics and dietary needs, it will recommend a daily nutrient and exercise plan to achieve your goals. At this point the real power and benefit of the program kick in. Successfully managing your weight means tracking your daily food consumption and exercise. CalorieKing Nutrition and Exercise Manager makes recording your meals, snacks, weight and exercise very easy. Every time you start the program you are presented with an optional Tip of the Day dialogue box that provides diet and exercise suggestions. Once in the main program area you are presented with a screen that has a daily calendar for your food diary on the left. On the right is a tabbed area to chose your food, exercise, custom foods, custom exercises and a tab for saved meals.

CalorieKing Nutrition and Exercise Manager includes an extensive food and exercise database with over 50,000 entries. You can manually update the database from CalorieKing's web site or the program can automatically check each month for updates. This makes it so easy because they've done all the work of figuring out the nutritional and calorie values of restaurant, supermarket national brands, prepared and fresh foods. The database can also determine calories burned by various levels and types of exercise. So for each meal, you simply drag, or right-click, the foods to one of the meals or snacks for that day. You can also combine groups of foods and save them as meals so you don't have to select individual items. You do the same with exercise, selecting the exercise and level of intensity and dragging it to the Exercise area on the left panel.

If you can't find your particular food or exercise item in their database you can create and save custom entries, which you can then reuse. As you enter your foods and exercise the program tracks how many calories you've used and have remaining for that day's allocation. Because the food database contains the nutritional information, the program will also track how many carbs, fat, protein, fiber, sodium, saturated fat, sugar, cholesterol and calcium have been consumed and how many you have remaining, based on what you entered during your Profile Questionnaire.

I found this program very easy to use. All the food logs I've used before, I had to figure out the calories, never mind all the other nutritional components. This is so much easier since CalorieKing has already done the work and you get so much more information on what you've consumed, making it easier to stay on track to reach your goals. CalorieKing Nutrition and Exercise Manager allows you to create printable reports with graphs and charts showing your progress.

The program is integrated with CalorieKing's web site where you can purchase a one year membership for $45.00 to download meal plans, based on your Personal Profile, publish your food diary and view other peoples' food diaries online. You can also get advice and support as well as ideas on how to plan your meals and exercise.

The only problem I found is when you are away from your computer. Then you have to remember to record your meals and exercise and enter them when you are back at your computer, hopefully you don't consume more than you should. CalorieKing has what appears to be the same program for Personal Digital Assistants [PDAs] that run the Palm operating system, Diet Diary for Palm OS, which should make it easy to capture the same information. Unfortunately, unlike with the Windows desktop version of CalorieKing Nutrition and Exercise Manager, the PDA version does not synchronize with the Mac desktop software. A company representative indicated they may release, in 2007, a version that will sync with the Mac desktop version of their program--then the combination will be perfect.