Vida One Diet & Fitness

Fitness software isn’t just for athletes and gym addicts – it can also be useful for casual exercisers who want to set targets for themselves.

Vida One Diet & Fitness allows users to track their diets, exercise, body weight, calories consumed and a lot of other things related to health and fitness, over a defined period of time.

The ribbon interface was easy to understand and will be familiar to users of Microsoft Office 2007. But to get the most from Diet & Fitness, users must invest a considerable amount of time entering data about their diet and exercise in some detail, so this type of program isn’t for everyone.

The first time the software launches, a wizard appears, asking questions about height, current weight and target weight and the program then calculates a Body Mass Index score ranging from underweight to obese. Next, the wizard asks for a target time scale to reach the desired weight that allows Diet & Fitness to calculate the required daily calorie intake adjustment.

Although the program flashes up a warning if foods added to the diet plan are not ideal for the selected diet type, it would have been nice to see some recommended food types depending on whether the target is weight loss or weight gain. Instead, a diet must be constructed from a long list of foods, each with its own nutritional data. Sadly, many of the included foods were unfamiliar American brands. Nutritional intake information can be exported to an Excel spreadsheet if required and this feature worked well.

Diet & Fitness automatically calculates the calories burned for each type of exercise and this updates as different elements of the exercise are changed. This is useful for tracking cardiovascular exercise but no so useful for strength training.

Polar and Garmin heart rate monitors are supported for all exercise types. We tested this feature using a Polar RS800CX which measures heart rate, speed, altitude and pace. Happily, importing the device’s data into a workout routine was easy and effective.

Vida One Diet & Fitness, then, is a decent fitness companion, but only if you are prepared to enter the data on a regular basis.