The Meal Builder is a program that runs within Microsoft Excel. It allows you to plan your Slenderful meals taking into account the points and the efficiency of your food choices. The higher your efficiency rating the more calories you get for the points you have chosen.  The key is to keep your efficiency above 80%.  The Benefit: You’ll feel better and lose less muscle, while losing fat just as fast.  With a click you can copy your meals to the spreadsheet and then you can print them out.  After you use it a while it starts to feel like a game – the challenge is to create an exciting meal with the right number of points and an efficiency rating as close to 100% as possible.  Let’s look at how it works.

The Meal Builder is based on the Slenderful Meal Planner but not limited to 5 meals. The Meal Builder allows you to set the number of meals you want.  There is also a progress-tracking feature in the Meal Builder.  After one week (don’t do this the first week) please recalculate your points once each week by clicking the “More >>” button and clicking on the bodybuilder in the lower left corner of the form.  After that you can click on the progress button and you’ll see a chart of your progress.  Don’t try this until you have at least 2 weeks of data or you’ll get an error.  I’m going to fix this so you can input and track body composition data from your body caliper tests.  I welcome your suggestions, but please keep in mind I am the sole programmer who is also running a company, raising a family and trying to train every day” – Michael Zumpano, CEO Champion Nutrition.

You start the Meal Planner program by simply double-clicking on the filename, Mbuilder.xls  As long as you have Microsoft Excel loaded on your computer it should work.  You can also start the program by starting Excel first and opening the Meal Builder from within Excel by clicking on the open folder icon and choosing the file name from the list.  When it loads it will give you a warning about Macros and viruses.  Click, “Yes”, to enable the Macros.  Otherwise the program will not work. If this is the first time you have used the Meal Planner the Form shown below should now be displayed.

If the form appears too large for your screen, if you can’t see the bottom of the form, your computer’s display is probably set to 640x480.  You need to set it to at least 800x600.  Fortunately, this is easily done.  Just send the entire Excel program to the bottom of the screen by clicking on the little “_” box in the upper right corner of the Excel program.  If you can see the background of your screen click on it using the right mouse button, not the left.  You should see a menu pop up.  Click on the bottom menu item, “Properties”.  You will see tabs at the top of the form that pops up.  Click on the “Settings” tab.  Use the “Screen Area” slider to set the screen resolution higher.  Click “OK”.  Then go down to the task bar and click the Excel icon to restore the meal planner.