Zonaware Home
Zonaware Home Purchase Recipes pic

ZoneRunner Software and Recipes

Zone diet software that's easy to use and inexpensive -- that's what ZoneRunner is. Welcome to Zonaware! This web site is dedicated to the sharing of recipes created by users of Zonaware's program. See how easy it is to make Sears-compliant recipes with ZoneRunner!

Why is Zonaware's recipe software better in many ways than competing products? First, it has an intuitive, three-step process to create a recipe. When you adjust the ingredient amounts, the program instantly shows the impact on many important factors relating to Dr. Sears' program: 30-40-30 (same as 40-30-30) balance, percentage of favorable carbohydrates, percentage of favorable fats, total calories, protein, carbohydrate, and fats are immediately updated. It's easy to adjust ingredients using your mouse and the up/down buttons.

ZoneRunner recognizes zone diet-favorable carbohydrate and fats choices. Since using vegetables and fruits for the main source of your carbohydrates is recommended in the Zone (it's a requirement, really) ZoneRunner rewards you with a happy face when the percentage of you carbs from those sources gets over 50% and an even happier face if over 75%. This retro-70s happy face thing is just an easy way to indicate when you are making the right choices. The prominence of favorable fats is indicated with another happy face icon. Since most fats should come from monounsaturated sources such as olive oil, canola oil, avocado and certain nuts, the program's fat choices happy face gets happy when you choose from those foods as your fat source. Remember that fats are an important component in the Zone -- and fat will not make you fat; the wrong choices of carbohydrates will.

Why was our software developed? Dr. Barry Sears, father of the Zone Diet, mentions in his books a rule of thumb for estimating a proper balanced meal. He says to have a piece of protein, like chicken breast, no bigger or thicker than the palm of your hand, and to fill 2/3 of your plate with Zone-favorable vegetables, and finally have a small amount of monounsaturated fat, such as a little avocado guacamole. There are two problem with this simple rule (which actually works pretty well):

  1. It gets boring.
  2. It just doesn't work for soups, casseroles, salads, and so on.
    3.
Some time in 1996, Peder Hultin, founder of Zonaware, started developing a spreadsheet to calculate recipe balances. It turned out to be pretty much of a hassle to use. He decided he needed to write his own program. At the time, he was learning Visual Basic at his job, and realized he could use his knowledge to create a useful tool for himself. In September 1997 he set out designing and coding what became ZoneRunner version 0. Almost five years later he is still adding features. For most of those years he paid lots of money (supporting the Zonaware web site) to give ZoneRunner away for FREE! Now he has changed it to shareware, hoping to support the website and even get some rewards back for all his hard work.

We hope you like our software and purchase a license for the latest release!
Feel free to offer software feature suggestions to ideas@zonaware.com.
Zonaware home ZoneRunner features Screen shots Download Purchasing
About the Zone Zone compliant recipes Links