Get Fiscally and Physically Fit

Sitting in front of a PC may not be good for your health or your finances--unless you use these practical programs.

Laura Blackwell, PC World

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A PC is good for more than crunching numbers at work or sending instant messages to buddies: Your trusty chips-and-pixels workhorse can help with many important issues of daily life, such as chipping away at debt and hitting the ideal rate of chips-and-salsa consumption. This month, I look at debt management software, a recipe organizer that makes cooking and shopping less burdensome, and a powerful diet-and-nutrition manager.

Because Debt's a Bad Deal

Whether it's a mortgage, a car loan, or just holiday credit card bills showing their ugly faces, most of us have debt to deal with. Debt Analyzer prioritizes up to 50 debts, helping you decide which bills to pay when.

Debt Analyzer takes your income, household budget, and debt details and creates realistic loan repayment schedules. You can test multiple debt repayment plans and loan consolidations. Debt Analyzer's default calculations assume you'd prefer to pay off the highest-interest loans first, but you can also set it to eliminate all debt by a certain date, which sometimes prioritizes larger loans.

You can create reports in several kinds of formats--bar charts, calendars, schedules, and summaries--to get feedback that makes sense to you. To make sure you're timing your payments correctly, you can examine monthly and daily repayment schedules. If you're still using paper checks and snail mail, you'll want to take advantage of Debt Analyzer's option to schedule payments days in advance of the due date, to factor in time spent en route.

You can try Debt Analyzer free for 30 days; to continue using it, you must register the program for $25.

Get Something Cooking

Sometimes we must leave the warm glow of our computer monitors and go make something to eat. With BigOven, it's a simple matter to find a recipe that uses what's already in the pantry--or, if the cupboard is bare, to make a list for a grocery run.

The trial version of BigOven arrives with more than 4000 recipes divided between six "recipe boxes": CrockPot, low-carb, mixed drinks, standard, vegetarian, and weight watch. You can search by keyword or use the Leftover Wizard to find a recipe that uses ingredients on hand.

If none of these recipes suits your fancy or the contents of your fridge, you can search the online archive of more than 150,000 recipes. Other users add and rate recipes, so you might be pleasantly surprised to find recipes for sushi and the Indian spinach dish saag paneer, along with advice as to which of the 40-plus chicken pot pies to make.

Even if you plan to use only your own favorite recipes, adding them to BigOven could make your life easier. With the calendar function, you can plan weeks of menus at once. Even better, BigOven composes shopping lists. Just click the "Add Shop" button to add a recipe's ingredients to a list, then deselect the items you already have in the kitchen. BigOven builds a list that even tells you what area of the store you'll find your groceries in. You can print out the lists, or--with the Palm OS and Windows Mobile beta software--upload them to your PDA.

BigOven offers a free 30-day trial; it costs $30 to buy the program.

Show Your Body Who's Boss

If keeping your computer healthy seems tricky, take a look at the latest FDA guidelines for human health. There's a wealth of information about what and how much to eat, not to mention what kind of exercise and how much of it you need. But translating that knowledge to your personal bottom line is a big task--one that's difficult to tackle alone. Enter DietPower, a food and exercise program that tracks 33 nutrients and takes care of the number crunching for you.

Although DietPower can calculate amounts based on your basic body stats, it also lets you tweak the requirements to your specific needs. If you're especially concerned about carbohydrates, fat, iron, sodium, or water (or any of the other usual suspects), you can customize the settings to have DietPower keep an eye on how much or how little you need. The online help explains what each nutrient does and the consequences of over- or underdoing it.

The program's greatest strength lies in its databases. DietPower has the goods on 11,000 foods and over a thousand kinds of exercise. When you drag the foods and exercise into your daily journal, DietPower keeps track and tells you how you're doing. The Nutrition Quotient is particularly useful; not only does it grade your daily performance, but it also tells you what foods can bump up your intake of underrepresented nutrients.

Although the database could show more in the way of foreign food--don't expect the lowdown on sushi or saag paneer--it does let you add foods and build recipes on your own, and save them for future use.

DietPower offers a 15-day free trial and costs $50 to register. If you take time off between ending the trial and registering the software, your records will remain intact.

Reader Reveals Firefox Secret

In my last column, I bemoaned the lack of a Dogpile Toolbar for the Mozilla Firefox browser. If you sniffled along with me, don't despair. Reader Gary Gooch of San Marcos, Texas points out that you can add Dogpile to the built-in search engine window in Firefox.

Gary writes: "To find it, click on the down arrow and choose 'add engines.' On the Firefox Central Web page that comes up, choose 'Find lots of other search engines.' Under the 'install search plugins' bar, type Dogpile into the site name search box and click the 'find search plugins' button. Choose 'dogpile' and you're in business."

And so I am--these instructions worked perfectly. Thanks, Gary!