Food exchange diet planner is a free tool which helps you in designing balanced diet plan as per the food exchange scheme. The food exchange scheme holds great importance amongst the dietician and nutrition specialists. This can be attributed to the fact that it’s completely accurate. The main task of this scheme is to define different food groups along with their servings. Since the food exchange diet planner is in accordance with the food exchange scheme, hence it can find great utility with food professionals and individuals to create the meal plans.
How to create your Diet Plan?
Step 1- As you can see in the interface above, initially, you need to enter your average daily requirements in calories. In case, you are not sure then you can use the Energy calculator which calculates the energy requirements for you based on certain parameters. You would be required to fill a number of fields. The following window appears:
As you can see above, you need to fill the basic details to compute your daily energy requirements. As you can see, the Basal metabolic rate is also mentioned. Food professionals can also click on the advanced option to check how the basal metabolic rate and total energy requirements are computed. Basal metabolic rate in simple terms is generally, the amount of energy spent by humans at rest. Below is a snapshot of how such calculations are done:
There are basically 4 formulae available in this software to compute the Basal metabolic rate to help you to prepare effective diet plan namely, Harris and Bennedict (1919), Harris and Bennedict, revised (1984), Owen et al. (1986) and Mifflin et al. (1990). You can also use a different formula by clicking on the custom formula option which is also available in the drop down menu. By default the formula used is Harris and Bennedict, revised (1984).
You can also check out free calorie calculators reviewed by us.
Step 2-This step involves you to specify the percentage amount of carbohydrates, proteins and fats which constitute the macronutrients. The drop down menu offers you 4 choices:
- Custom diet: You can specify the amounts yourself. This option is best suited for food professionals.
- Balanced diet: This is the perfect blend of quality and the required proportion of all the nutrients.
- Zone diet: this advocates consuming calories from carbohydrates, fat and protein in a balanced ratio.
- High carb diet: As the name suggests, this corresponds to a diet pertaining a higher carbohydrate concentration.
For this particular diet plan, we have chosen balanced diet.
Also check out websites which let you make a free exercise schedule.
Step 3-The final step is when you need to define the servings for different food groups namely- fruits, vegetable and dairy products. Here again you have a number of choices:
- Custom preferences
- Balanced preferences
- Mediterranean diet
- Emphasis on diary products
- Lots of fruits
- Lots of vegetables
- No dairy products
Whatever option you pick, the number of servings for each food group would be tabulated. We chose Balanced preferences.
This is what our plan looked like when we were done:
Verdict
Food exchange diet planner is a powerful tool if you wish to create a perfect diet plan for yourself. It’s simple and just takes a couple of minutes. Hence there is no reason why you would not want to try it unless it is something that does not interest you at all.
Download Food Exchange Diet Planner free.
