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About Diet Planner Pro

Diet Planner Pro is brought to you by Markitsoft, a UK software company based in Cambridge, England, specialising in the development of spreadsheets for planning and control. The concept behind Diet Planner Pro came about after a reunion with an old friend who lost one third of his body weight on a calorie controlled diet used by bodybuilders. Bodybuilders are obsessive about food, meal plans and dieting to lose fat. Many professional bodybuilders also make money from modeling, so it's extremely important they are lean and look good for both the competitions and the cameras.

When it come to diets and slimming, men are inclined to think its something that women do. We really don't think dieting and slimming is a very manly way to be carrying-on. Sadly, however, obesity in British men is growing 50 percent faster than in women, a fact undoubtedly caused by our aversion to the very mention of the words 'dieting' and 'slimming'. So apart from the bodybuilding aspect of the diet appealing to my macho side, it didn't try and sell itself as a diet but rather a healthy way of eating.

Clearly, the basic principles of the diet could be applied to anyone wanting to lose weight, so I gave it a go myself. Having tried various diets and weight lose pills in the past, I was sceptical whether a bodybuilding diet would work for a 105 kg (234 pound), middle-aged bloke who spends most of his time sitting behind a desk and who's most muscular body parts are his fingers, benefiting from daily workouts on a computer keyboard! Well I'm converted, the weight simply dropped off; I lost 5  kilos (11 pounds) in 4 weeks, and it's still coming off. What's more, by eating 6 times a day, I don't feel hungry. To quote one of the bodybuilders from www.bodybuilding.com:

"You see the body's metabolism is like a fireplace: the more wood you put in (a little at a time), the hotter and stronger the fire gets. Now if you were to put too much wood at one time into the fire it would actually suffocate the fire and cause it to lose its oxygen, and without this a fire cannot burn.

The same goes for your body. If you eat small meals throughout the day and frequently, your body's metabolism will begin to burn hotter, therefore burning up mostly anything you eat. The old saying still rings true about the fact that people who eat a lot all day long with smaller meals will be thinner than a person who just eats once or twice a day with large meals."

Anthony Catanzaro, from Bodybuilding.com

The only problem I had was actually planning and controlling the diet. I tried a diet software product I found on the internet, but found it's database design too cumbersome. Knowing how flexible spreadsheets are for solving planning and control problems, work started on Diet Planner Pro. I quickly found it a breeze to manage my diet using the spreadsheet philosophy. It actually become fun playing around with different recipes and foods, shaving a few extra calories off my diet here and there. The biggest challenges were keeping within my daily limit for carbohydrates and eating enough protein. Keeping within my limit for fats was surprisingly easy. Diet Planner Pro helped by flagging up problem areas so I could quickly see which meals and foods were causing the problem. I had no idea that carbohydrates are found in such quantities in so many foods. The whole exercise was a really interesting eye opener into healthy nutrition.