Getting Started

The Main Window

The food manager window is broken down into four parts.  In the upper left hand corner you have a pop-up menu to select the food category, and window which displays a list of foods in that category.  In the upper right hand corner is the nutritional information for the selected food or meal.  In the lower left hand corner is a display which shows your daily record of foods, and in the lower right hand corner is the total nutritional information for a given day.

The Pop-Up Menu - The pop-up menu allows you to choose your food categories from which to pick foods.  Choosing a category will display the foods for that category in the window directly below. After you select a category, it will take Diet Sleuth a few moments to compile a list of all of the foods in the category. These foods are listed in alphabetical order.

The Food List Window - This is the window directly below the pop-up menu.  It will display the foods in a chosen food category, allowing you to select foods to enter into your daily menu.   In the picture above Fruit is selected as the food category, and some of the fruits are displayed in the window.  The scroll bar on the left will allow you to move through the foods, or you may type in the first few letters of a food and the window will jump to that area of the food list.

Once you find a food you want to enter into your daily record, you can highlight the food with a single click of the mouse.  The nutritional information for the highlighted food will be displayed in the Nutritional Information window on the upper right hand side.  

To enter the food into your daily record, just double click on the item (you can also click on the food once while holding down the option key).  A window will pop up which will allow you to enter your serving size and with which meal the item should be included, which is shown below.

In this window you see the name of the food, serving size as defined by the USDA database, and the serving weight in grams and ounces.  Below the serving weight is an entry box in which you enter the number of servings of a given item.  In the example above, the serving size is 1/2 cup.  If you were having 1/2 cup of blackberries, you would enter "1" in the number of servings.   This works well for serving sizes that are easy to convert, such as cups.  But not all serving sizes are as easy, and so below the entry box for the number of servings is a conversion calculator.

Say you ate one cup of blackberries, and wanted to convert 1 cup into the 1/2 cup serving size.  You would put a "1" in the entry box for the conversion calculator, and then select "cup" as your measurement (that is, you ate 1 cup).  Then you would select the units to convert the serving into, which in this case is 1/2 cup (the serving size).  You see the number of servings is listed automatically, 2 servings, since 1 cup is equal to two 1/2 cup servings.

You can also enter in the time you ate the food, and select one of five meals, if you'd like. This information is purely optional, and is available for people who want to keep track of when they ate certain meals.  

Once you're done, click on the OK button. Diet Sleuth will now remember that you've eaten this food, and this meal will be displayed in the daily record of foods for this day, in the lower left corner. Your daily totals will also be updated.

You can likewise enter in other foods eaten for the day. The Daily Total Nutrition will display the total for all foods eaten for the day. Clicking on one of the foods eaten will display the nutritional information for just that food, in the upper right corner. 

To edit the serving information for food that you've entered, or delete it completely, double-click on the food in the Daily Total display in the lower left corner of the Diet Sleuth window. You may also click on the food , and then click on the food again while holding down the option key. You are then asked whether or not you really want to delete this serving of a food, or edit the entry. Click on the Delete button to remove the food, the Edit button to edit this entry, or the Cancel button to leave it.

The small pie chart shows the percent of calories from carbohydrates, protein, and fat, as appropriate for a single food, meal, or the day. These percentages are also displayed next to the gram values. 

You'll see today's day and date in the middle left side of the window, in between two arrows, marked Prev and Next. Clicking on these arrows will take you backwards and forwards through the information on the foods you've eaten. This makes it easy to go back to what you ate yesterday, or last week. 

To speed up moving through dates, you can hold down the option key while clicking, this will move you by one week instead of one day. Likewise, holding down the command key will change the date by 30 days.

There are two special food categories - "Custom & Recipes" and "Favorite Foods".

First favorite foods - There are some foods that you probably eat quite often. To save time, you can add an alias to these foods to the favorite foods category. To do this, just select the food by clicking on it once, and then select  Add To Favorites from the Action menu. Now a copy of that food will appear in the Favorite Foods category. You can always remove it by clicking on it once, and selecting Remove From Favorites from the Action menu.

Next, Custom & Recipes:

A custom food is a food that you enter into Diet Sleuth. For example, there may be a particular type or brand of food that you eat that isn't in the Diet Sleuth food database. You can enter in the nutritional information (say off the side panel) for this food. 

To do this, go to the Custom & Recipes category, and select Add Custom Food... from the Action menu. You'll get a window where you can enter in a name for the food, and the nutritional information. Here's an example for a ficticious pizza:

You don't have to enter in nutritional information for all of the fields, if you don't have the information or it isn't of interest to you. If you'd like to edit a previously entered custom food, select it by clicking on it once while holding down the control key.

Next a recipe: 

This is useful for foods that you make yourself. You select which ingredients make up the food, and how many servings the recipe makes. Diet Sleuth totals the nutritional information for all of the ingredients, divides by the number of servings, and figures out the nutritional information per serving.

To create a recipe, go to the Custom & Recipes category and select Add Recipe... from the Action menu. You'll get  a window like the one below, which has been filled in for a home-made fruit salad:

The various ingredients were added, and the number of servings was set to 4. So Diet Dleuth automatically computed the nutritional information per serving. Now this recipe can be used just like a normal food.  If you'd like to edit a previously entered recipe, select it by clicking on it once while holding down the control key.

Finding a Food:

With over 5500 different foods in 21 categories, it can sometimes be difficult to find a particular food. Fortunately, Diet Sleuth has a search feature which allows you to find any foods that match your request. To search for foods, perform the following steps:

1. Select "Find..." from the Edit menu.

2. Type in the text that you are looking for. You may type in more than one word, but if you do so, all the words must appear in the food name in exactly the same order that you typed them. For example, "roast beef" would find "roast beef sandwich", but would not find "beef, roast".

3. Click the OK button. Diet Sleuth will search the descriptions of all of the foods available, and jump to the first one that matches your request.

4. If you would like to search for additional foods that match your search request, select "Find Again" under the Edit menu. Diet Sleuth will search for the next food that matches your request. You may continue to do this to search for additional foods.