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Weight By Date is a piece of diet software that aims to provide users with a range of useful tools and resources to support any diet plan. The key element of the Weight By Date program, as its name would suggest, is that the dieter is able to view changes in weight, body size, diet, exercise and more in the context of the amount of time they have been dieting. By allowing users to set clear goals and track those goals using a comprehensive set of tracking and progress tools, users are more motivated to achieve weight loss and progress to their desired weight and body shape.

Users have the option of either downloading the software or purchasing the CD-ROM in order to load it onto their PC (the software is not available for Mac). Once installation is complete, users must set up a user profile that contains all their relevant data. This is fairly simple to do, and users can start using the software once the basic profile is complete (weight, height, gender, age, weight loss goals), although there is also a more comprehensive profile available (which enhances the usability of the software and opens up additional features) that can be completed at the users leisure. Perhaps one of the most impressive and useful tools featured on the Weight By Date software is the diet calendar feature, something which is pretty unique to this software. As users progress with their diet, they enter the details of every food they consume each day, along with exercise data, to provide a fairly accurate calorie 'balance' for that day. This is stored on the calendar, and each week, when the user weighs, the software automatically calculates changes in weight and shows, diagrammatically, how the diet has changed. While this feature will undoubtedly appeal to many people, as it offers users the chance to track almost everything we could think of, for us, there was just too much measuring, weighing, tracking and calculating involved for this software to be all that helpful. In order to use all of the features to their fullest, users would have to weigh themselves three or four times a week, take full body measurements once a week, make entries into the food diary daily and work out a daily calorie balance simply to track their weight loss over a monthly period. In all honesty, it all seemed a little too intensive for us!

That said, there were other features on the software that may appeal to dieters. The calorie database allows users to check the calorie value of any food from a vast collection of entries (40,000 - more than we have ever come across in any other diet or weight loss program). Even if, like us, users don't want to enter their details every day, using this database as a method of checking whether a particular food 'fits' into your diet plan would still be effective. The meal planner and recipe builder tools are also incredibly effective, simply as a means of working out weekly menus and storing information about recipes you have created. We were particularly impressed by the feature which allows users to calculate automatically the calorific and nutrient content of their own creations using the database.

For a one off payment of around $40 users could, without a doubt, find a lot in this software to benefit their diet. Equally, that depends on what sort of dieter intends using the software, and whether they will use the tools included so as to get the most out of them.