HI WantFit:
I had purchased the full PC version of Fitday several years ago, and even found the download codes and reloaded it (after a crash) back on my computer and will be starting in ernest again next week... this was my first exposure to any sort of diet tracking and found it easy, quick, and as long as I kept up with it, gave me all the information I needed (except how to FIX what I was lacking). This is a definate plus to Cathe's Nutrition software.
on 12/1 got a 1 month subscription to Cathe's Nutrition Manager... Let's just say that I logged in 3 days of my mealplans and got discouraged because, in all honesty, I am a crappy eater! However, I don't quite get the whole thing about the suggestions to clean up your menu... I tried to change some preplanned menus but I could never get a meal plan to be all A's or even A's and B's on my own...
One thing that I did like is that you have access to meals that others have created, however, this does not guarantee that they are the best options or have the best grades...
When "shopping" for others mealplans, it also allows you to select foods you want to include (or exclude rather) when selecting other meal plans... so say for instance you do not eat onions... you simply remove it from the lists of foods to search for, and it will display all meals others have created withOUT onions... you can remove any foods you want... I whittled down the list from well over 15,000 daily menus to just 107 by doing this... I did find a few that had fair (A's and B's) and saved them (as PDF's), printed some of the shopping lists and will go back to Fitday...
Also, you can enter a lot of your information and it will tell you what your calorie range should be... You can create your own custom foods as well, by entering all the nutritional information from the labels...
So, basically it has some good points, but for me I just didn't use it any more or get any other information than I can't get from something I don't have to pay for each month... I do have to say that it was worth the $10 for the single month subscription to just see what it was all about... I used to spend more than that a month on snacks, so at least it will be money well spent even if you only do it for a months time...
This is just my experience, so hopefully others will have more info
ETA: one major drawback that I found is that while the menu would display a certain "meal" if the user didn't break it down into the base components you have NO idea whether your "chicken salad" is the same as their "chicken salad"... I had a hard time banking on the results when things weren't explained or detailed... When I enter a meal, I make sure I try to count every spoonfull, every ingredient... But I honestly didn't check out the "recipe" feature either, so maybe that would help for things I made, but not explain what others did...
