diet app - Keyboard Athletes

Geek Fit Friday – iPhone App Lose It (Part 2)

A couple of months ago I reviewed my favorite iPhone diet and exercise logging application — Lose It!

Since that time, the people at FitNow have added in a whole lot more accountability in to the application, and made it a whole lot harder to “forget” to track your food intake.

Facebook and Twitter updates. Clearly not for the faint of heart, but you can post your exercise logging, your weight gain/loss, or when you hit your goal.
Mealtime logging reminders. Now that the iPhone has push capability, Lose It! has taken advantage of it, and you can configured reminders to go off up to 4 times a day to ping you to enter your food and exercise. Personally, a HUGE win in terms of remembering to use it!
Friends. This isn’t my favorite feature, but I’ll mention it for the sake of completeness. You can invite people to be your friends on loseit.com, and watch their stats as well (overall weight gain or loss, calories consumed, and last logging date). I love the idea, but I don’t have the energy to create another network.
Emailed reports. You can set up daily and/or weekly spreadsheets of goals, food intake, exercise to be emailed to any email address. As a coach, this is super-cool for me (and if you are one of my clients, beware) — I want this from my clients, and now I don’t have to ask them to double-log. And, it comes straight to my inbox, in Excel, where I can use my Excel ninja skills to get exactly what I want.

To set any and all of these settings, go to http://loseit.com, and sign up for a free account. The settings are all under the aptly-named tab, “Motivators” (except Friends, which is under the “Friends” tab). You can’t enter any food or exercise in on the web site, but even if you don’t want to take advantage of the Motivators, it does have some really nice reporting on it that you can’t find in the app.

My only complaint is that it is limited to the Apple ecosystem (iPhone and iTouch), but if you are an iPhone user, I definitely suggest you check it out!

Geek Fit Friday – Lose It!

Conceptually, weight loss is an easy idea. Take in less calories than we expend. From there, the wheels tend to come off.

Anyone (or anything) that can tell you they know exactly how many calories you burn in any activity is flat-out lying to you. The best anyone can do is make an educated guessed based on the “average” person – however you define that. Current weight, muscle mass, metabolism, and how hard you are working all get factored in.

So, the only thing we can REALLY do is count our intake. The National Weight Control Registry shows that individuals that manage to lose 30+ pounds and keep it off 5+ years eat between 1400 and 1800 calories per day. That is a tried and true model for success, so I think it’s a good one to work from. (NOTE: They also exercise an hour a day – it’s not ALL about the food.)

My favorite iPhone app for tracking calories is an application called Lose It!

It’s Free
It allows you to save your meals so you can easily repeat from day to day
It allows you to create your own foods
It lets you choose what nutrients you want to track (I like to track my protein)
It has a fantastic food database. I’m super-impressed with the food database
It remembers the portion size you last used with that food
It lets you enter your weight and weight loss goals and helps you determine your daily caloric target (which you can also override)

It also lets you enter your exercise, but I have to admit, I have yet to use that feature.

P.S. If you really can’t live without a number to put to your training session, you can assume 400 cals for good, solid hour of work. Yep, that’s it.

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Geek Fit Friday – iPhone App Lose It (Part 2)

Geek Fit Friday – Lose It!

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