Zone Diet Spreadsheet

[Bruce Gray]

I just came across Nathan's spreadsheet. It is excellent work, and has motivated me to delve deeper into the Zone Diet and its block structure.

It also motivated me to share a diet spreadsheet I've evolved over several years. I recently released this spreadsheet into the wild via the blog mentioned below.

I am a physiologist in Australia, and have used the xls to educate clients about macronutrient intake and as a diet planner.

Some of the algorithms were developed for commercial software and the xls was used as a proof of concept to demonstrate diet education and planning to several government health authorities.

There is a database of ingredients that you can add to, but I live in Australia and the planner was designed to build diets out of mostly raw unprocessed ingredients. US, Canadian, and Europeans tend to eat more processed foods. (I've lived in all these countries and know it is so.) As you can imagine, the variety of processed or packaged food is endless. Rather than expand the database to cover these, I suggest everyone eats more unprocessed food.

There are several template 1 week portion plans in the xls currently, but nothing based on the Atkins or Zone diets.

You can easily experiment building your own diets, and watch macronutrient percentage/grams and total Calories update automatically.

It also has a shopping list generator, but keep in mind that this requires editing price and package information in the database, to represent your local prices. Current prices are what we pay in Australia, which is on average higher than North America and Europe.

It is a large spreadsheet, and will look overwhelming at first. But it is all quite logical and has instructions.

The weight tracking chart is one of the most valued features by my clients.....and this feature was difficult to program. Microsoft excel is quite hamstrung in its charting abilities, and this required a lot of vba coding to overcome.

All functionality works in US (imperial) or metric units.
It can also be used for bulking phases when you are increasing gross weight.

Compatibility Notes
It won't run if macros aren't enabled.
It should run on any windows system with excel 97,03,07.
It won't run on Macs because Microsoft didn't build macro (visual basic) capability into Excel for Macs. (however, I don't know if Microsoft has updated this limitation recently).
If you have issues, try the service pack updates for XPP or MS Office.
Open Office and Linux: unfortunately, visual basic varies considerably in OO, and it would take several hundred man hours to adapt the macros from excel to OO. I don't have the time or expertise.

I'd be interested in any feedback.

Download via googling "Grays Diet Planner"
or go to first blog entry at
http://graysdietplanner.blogspot.com/