Debby > I don't know about the software, but fitday.com I have not found
to be preachy at all.  It's free and pretty easy to use.  It tells you
what your base metabolic rate is (how many calories you burn) vs. your
calories consumed.

Good news that it's not preachy.  This is my remaining concern, then.
Because of the complexity of real life, these tools can never be
anything other than approximators -- and sometimes that approximation
is way off and can be very misleading.

For instance, there is no such thing as a simple "calories in, calories
out" model.  As much as that's the accepted paradigm, it just doesn't
hold up in real life.  Why?  Calories for a particular food -- even if
you were to eat that food alone with no interaction with other
potentially counteracting foods-- are derived by burning it in an
instrument called a "bomb calorimeter" and then counting how many
calories are produced.  Fine and well, but the body doesn't "burn" food
the same way a flame does.  It is more efficient with some macronutrient
types (carbs for instance) and less efficient with others (protein).
The calories in, calories out model assumes all are handled with equal
aplomb by the body.  Reality is that macronutrients are used by the
body with varying degrees of efficiency and with an infinite variety of
bodily calculations based upon what's eaten, what the body's needs are
at the time, etc.

One other item that makes this tool suspect in my eyes.  I would enter
that I'm doing less than one hour a week of high intensity weight
training.  I suspect that I would not get much "credit" for exercise if
that's all I'm doing -- those who, say, run for twenty miles a week
would probably be given a whole lot more credit.  I can argue though --
and I think there's math out there to prove it -- that I'm actually
burning more calories per week than the runner.