weight gain - Keyboard Athletes

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!

Conventional wisdom states that diet and exercise are the key to weight loss – you either need to lower calories or increase exercise to lose weight. Long ago I did the math, and quickly concluded that I’d rather eat less than train longer – just seemed to be the more efficient route. As kettlebell instructor David Whitley likes to say, “you can’t out-snatch a donut”.

This study from Loyola University found there was no association between weight gain and calories burned during physical activity. It is just simply too hard to exercise enough to really make a difference.

That having been said, there are a million other reasons why regular exercise is a great idea, from better sleep to improved memory and brain function, to reducing the likelihood of chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and various cancers. You aren’t as likely to develop osteoporsis and significantly more likely to age gracefully and avoid assisted living situations. But, if you are planning on treadmilling yourself thin, you might want to think again.

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

Diet more important than activity levels

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