Loadstar 128 #33/q33side1.d64/t.food calc

Text File | 1992-01-01 | 13.0 KB | 280 lines

                         F O O D    C A L C   ' 9 7

                      Program and Text by Mark Jordan


 FENDER'S PREMUMBLE: This nutrition program was published on LS 128 #7 way
back in the Stone Age when we only had one drive, and it was drive 8. I've
gone through it and changed it so it will now work on whatever drive you
boot it up on. You can't change drives after running the program but if you
put all of the files associated with this program in a subdirectory or
partition on a 1581 disk, RAMLink or HD, it will work fine. The program has
been compiled for speed and is easy to use.

 The list of foods and their caloric and cholesterol contents is the same
one that Mark Jordan provided before. It has some blanks in it where Mark
didn't know the numbers, but it's very easy to update it with more modern
figures. Here's Mark to tell you all about it.


    FOOD CALC is an intuitive program that helps users keep track of
calories and cholesterol. What makes it so easy to use is the fact that you
need never do any typing of information -- with FOOD CALC you simply use
the CRSR keys and RETURN to make virtually everything happen. Even the date
is entered via the CRSR keys and RETURN.

    The program comes to you with a 284-item food list which includes
calorie and cholesterol info as well as serving sizes and other pertinent
data. Most every food you eat is on this list including 35 popular fast
foods (like Big Macs, Tostadas, and Kentucky Fried Chicken). These 284
items may very well be all you'll ever need to use.

    However, if there are some food items you regularly eat that aren't on
the list, it's easy to add them. In fact, you can have up to 1000 total
food items.

    In case you're wondering what types of foods might not have made the
list, tofu is one. But if you're still into bell-bottoms and communal
living, hey -- go for it. You'll simply need to find a good nutrional book
that includes such esoteric treats as tofu. Try looking under H (for
hippie) in the library.

 FENDER'S NOTE: When I was a free spirit in the 60s, I considered the
hippie ethic to be "if it feels good, do it". It felt good to eat
enchiladas, tacos, Mongolian beef and hot fudge sundaes. I don't think it
would have felt good to eat tofu. Still don't.

    When you first run FOOD CALC you'll discover an 80-column screen full
of colorful windows, six of them to be exact. Four of them look like index
cards, three stacked vertically on the right side of the screen labelled
Breakfast, Lunch, and Supper, and one on the bottom left labelled Food
Data.

    In the center of the screen is a tall, thin window with sixteen food
items listed -- the Foods window. And the last one is on the upper-left:
this is your Main Menu window.

    There are nine main menu choices, though there are really only three
modes of operation. Mode One is inputting today's diet; Mode Two is
altering the food list (you may never need to use this mode); and Mode
Three is everything else. The nine options are as follows:

 1 -- Enter Today's Diet (Mode One)
 2 -- Input/Edit Food Data (Mode Two)
 3 -- Print Diet Info (beginning of Mode Three)
 4 -- Clear Entries from screen
 5 -- Change Printer Info
 6 -- Change Date
 7 -- Load Previously Saved Data
 8 -- Delete Present Entry
 9 -- Quit to LOADSTAR

    The first thing you need to do is set today's date. Use the CRSR
UP/DOWN keys to flip through the months, and press RETURN on the right one.
Then do the same for the date and year.


 MODE ONE
 {SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}

    Option 1 is the first you'll likely use. Let's say it's midnight, and
you've just settled down to do some serious calorie-checking. Press 1 to
get into the input mode.

    The middle food list window becomes active, its top food item (Alfalfa)
is highlighted. Another window gets activated when you enter this mode:
the Breakfast "index card." The word "Breakfast" on the tab flashes, and a
third window, the Food Data window also gets busy... five lines of
information about Alfalfa is displayed.

    Obviously, the goal of this mode is to select the food items from the
center menu and enter them onto the Breakfast menu. Since the center menu
is a scrolling window of our 284 items of food, we need to find our food
item first.

    The simplest and slowest way to do that is to press CRSR DOWN until it
shows up. A faster way is to press the plus (+) key and watch the window
cycle through the food list a screenful (16) items at a time. An even
faster way is to simply press the first letter of the food you're looking
for and wait for the first food with that alphabetical designation to show
up, then use the CRSR DOWN and/or plus key to home in on it.

    Get it?  You will when you try it once. And don't worry about
remembering all this: the main menu changes when you enter this mode and
offers help. Besides the CRSR DOWN and plus keys for aid, you may also use
the CRSR UP key (naturally), the minus key (to go back a screen at a time),
the HOME key to go to the top of the window/list, and the British pound key
(\) to go to the bottom of the window/list. With these conveniences it
shouldn't take you more than a second or two to find and select any food on
the list.

    To select the item, just press RETURN when you've got it highlighted.
At this point, that food will appear on the first line of your Breakfast
menu with a quantity of one unit and the calories that equals. Of course,
you may have eaten more or less than exactly one unit -- you'll need a way
to adjust. And what's this unit business anyway?

    The unit is, in most cases, the standard serving. You'll find what unit
is used on the Food Data card. For instance, if you select Eggs, you'll
discover the unit is one...one egg. The unit for milk is ounces, the unit
for pizza is one 1/8 piece of a 15 inch pizza.

    You must adjust these units to as close to what you actually ate as
possible. If you selected "Eggs, scrambled" you might not know if you ate
one, one and a half, two, or what. FOOD CALC can't help you here.

    Do your best to estimate. (And no lying, you understand?)  Once you've
determined the amount, use the CRSR UP/DOWN and CRSR LEFT/RIGHT keys to
adjust. The UP/DOWN keys adjust a tenth of a unit at a time. The LEFT/RIGHT
keys adjust one unit at a time. You'll get used to this quickly and, I
believe, find it a nifty way to do things.

    Once you've adjusted the quantity of your Eggs, press the ENTER key on
the numeric keypad. This will force you to lift your hand from the home
keys. An oversight, this annoyance? Nope. I purposefully elected to force
you to use the ENTER key (rather than RETURN) because the RETURN key is
used to select food from the center list and it gets confusing to use the
same key to do two different and important things.

    After pressing ENTER, you may now add any other foods you had for
breakfast. There is a limit to how many foods you can list: six. If, in the
unlikely event you ate more than six different items for breakfast, one
option would be to simply carry over extra items to the lunch menu.

 FT'S NOTE: Judi, my wonderful wife who knows more about preparing meals
than I ever will, suggests that if you cook casseroles, goulashes or
"leftover surprises" that contain several items, figure out the total
caloric and cholesterol content of a helping and enter that as a new item
on the list. This way you can get around the six-only restriction of the
program.

    How do you get to the lunch menu? You must press the equal sign (=).
This tells FOOD CALC you're done inputting foods for whatever meal you are
on. Lunch and Supper are pretty much the same as Breakfast so that's enough
on all that.

    Immediately after you press the last equal sign (after the Supper list
is complete) your data will be saved. Data is saved according to the month
you have entered. You'll find it on disk with a "d." prefix to help
separate it from other programs and files.

    It is highly advisable to enter your day's eatings in chronological
order because there is no way to rearrange them short of deleting daily
entries, a laborious task.


 PRINTING
 {SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}

    When the saving is done, you're back at the Main Menu with its eight
options. Let's break with tradition and jump directly to the third one
(we'll cover number two later) since that's the one you'll undoubtedly want
to go to next on your maiden voyage with FOOD CALC.

    This option is the Printing option. A print menu will appear with 4
sub-options:  you can print the whole year's data, the present month's, the
present day's, or a monthly tally chart.

    You may print to the printer or to the screen. Just follow prompts. You
can control the style of printout by entering the Printer Info option (#5)
on the main menu. That will also be covered shortly.

    The printouts show you pretty much the same info the screen does: the
three meals, their caloric and cholesterol contents item by item with meal
and daily tallies on each. The charting option allows you to see your
calorie/cholesterol intake in a graph form with an average of each for the
month.


 MODE TWO
 {SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}

    Okay, now let's head back north and cover that second main menu option
which is also the second main Mode of operation: altering the food list.
This is a logical place to put this anyway because at this point you may
realize that there is a food item or two missing from the existing list
that you really need...say, tofu.

    Press 2 and you've just made the center list of food active again.
Press the British pound key (\) once and your cursor will jump to the
bottom of the window. Press it again and you'll be transported to the
bottom of the entire list.

    Your cursor will be sitting on a blank line, just the spot you need to
add an item. Press RETURN. Now enter the information for your food item
line by line. Your typing will appear on the lower-left index card.
Conclude each line with a RETURN. After you've typed the last one, you'll
be back on the center menu... after a short pause. The pause is due to the
computer realphabetizing your entire food list.

    You can edit any item on the list (you may find my original unit sizes
inconvenient, for instance) by simply going to the item, pressing RETURN,
and typing.

    Use the DELete key to get rid of unwanted characters. To save your
added or edited items, press the BACK ARROW.

    The food-item mode of operation has several other features to make your
life easier. If you happen to edit an existing food item and change its
name you might need to re-sort the list. For instance, the list as it
stands now includes Cola as an item. Easterners might prefer to call it
Soda, Midwesterners Pop, Southerners sasparilla, and some individuals might
simply want to use the brand names such as Coke, Pepsi, etc.

    Go ahead and make the change, then press UP ARROW to re-sort the list
before re-saving it. A word of warning: with 284 items, re-sorting is a
fairly slow process, even with a compiled program.

    You also have the option of deleting any food item from the list. You
don't drink? Then get Beer off that list -- no sense tempting yourself. Use
the asterisk (*) and answer Yes to the followup prompt (press Y).

    That's about it for Mode Two. The rest of the Main Menu features are
fairly straightforward. Press 4 to clear the index cards on the screen.
Press 5 to install (or change) the printer commands to suit your printer.


 PRINTER SETUP
 {SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}{SHIFT-*}

    A word of explanation here: the first time you run the program you'll
be asked if you want to include special printer functions. The special
functions are the ability to underline, use a font of your choice, and set
a left margin of your choice. If you don't understand printer codes, skip
this (press N at the prompt). Or get your printer manual and give it a try:
the worst you can do is get goofy results. You can always try again.

    As always, simply follow the prompts. The first will ask you for
underline commands. My Star printer requires the following CHR$ values to
invoke underline:  27  45  1. So I type 27 [RETURN], 45 [RETURN], and 1
[RETURN]. Then, to tell the computer that's it, I press RETURN on a blank
line. As I said, the worst you can do is have to start over. Try it.

 FENDER'S NOTE: The default printer file on the LOADSTAR 128 disk is for my
Star NX-2410 Epson-emulating printer. For underline, I have 27,45,49 and to
stop underline it's 27,45,48.

    You may find that the printer must be on in order to alter the printer
codes. Keep this in mind.

    Press 6 to change the current date. You'll want to do this if you are
inputting several days' data at once. Press 7 to look at a previously-saved
day's eating activities. And press 8 to delete the current date's data on
the disk.

    All of this is prompt-driven and self-explanatory. Mosey through the
features for a few minutes and you'll feel comfortable.

    FOOD CALC was designed for one specific person -- me -- with one
specific goal -- to lose weight. Has it worked? Nah. But it has been fun
seeing how many calories I consume daily and how much cholesterol I ingest.
I make no claims that typing in food data will turn you into Joe Svelte or
Josephine Sveltine.

    But it might.

              \\\\\ R - Run   RETURN - Menu \\\\\