Everyone knows the secret to losing weight while remaining energized lies in the amount of calories in vs. calories expended, but lately, everyone seems to want to know the best way to track what they’ve eaten. Lucky for us, there are tons of apps and gadgets that help us do this! Here are a few (some we’ve heard about and some that we’ve tested), and what people are saying about them.
Lose it! Calculates how many calories are in the foods and drinks you consume every day. Enter your goal weight, current weight, height and age and Lose It! will tell you exactly how many calories you should consume each day to get to where you want to be. Enter what you eat and how much you exercise and it tells you how many calories you have left to consume during your day. Lyssie has tested this and thinks it’s a great app.
The Restaurant Nutrition app by Foundation HealthCare Network, offers nutrition information—calories, fat, sodium, carbohydrates, etc.—for restaurant menus, and a running profile to keep track of what users eat. Although the app has about 250 restaurant menus in its database, if you tend not to eat out at national chains, it may be hard to get a good idea of how much you’re eating. We haven’t tried this and as we don’t eat at the restaurants often enough to make it useful for us, but many people will find this very helpful in guiding their restaurant healthy decisions.
Myfitnesspal, an iPhone app, as well as a website, lets you input what you’re eating, and has many options including preparation. In addition, they have a variety of exercises you can log, including sports like basketball, baseball, and fishing, and even every day activities such as mowing the lawn! Some of the calorie counts are entered by other members, so they may be a bit off. Also, people tend to underestimate how much they’re eating so overeating may occur if you don’t have a good idea about portion sizes. (From what we have heard from others, this is a great app.)
iMapMyRUN is a great app for people who like to run outside. This app tracks your distance based on GPS on a live route map, your pace, calories burned, and your elevation. They have a database of over 26 million routes, and the app allows you to upload your workouts to your account on the mapmyrun website (www.mapmyrun.com). We can’t wait to try this—how cool is this?! We’ll be totally inspired by getting to see our pace, our elevations, calories and our live route, can’t wait to give it a go, so excited! Woohoo!
Do you have a favorite nutrition/fitness app? Any you’d like to recommend?