The App that Changed My Life

There are a lot of advertisements for systems that will help you lose weight. Everything from Weight Watchers, EMP180, Nutrisystems, Jenny Craig and the list goes on and on.

You can spend a lot of money and if you follow them you can lose weight. But what happens when you are done and stop using those systems. Chances are you will end up gaining the weight back unless you stay on their system.

Educate Yourself

For me they were not even an option because I couldn’t afford any of them. What was affordable was educating myself. The one thing I knew was when you eat less calories than you burn, you will lose weight.

3500 calories equal one pound, so if you consume 500 calories less than you burn each day for seven days you will theoretically burn off a pound a week.

The difficulty is in accurately counting calories. I tried to count calories when I was younger. I had booklets and charts giving calorie counts for various food but it was so time consuming to be leafing through the books trying to find each food and writing it down and calculating that I gave that up quickly.

Thankfully, technology has advanced to the point that a lot of the tracking can be done automatically now. I decided to look for an app on my phone to help me count calories.

What I found was an app called Lose it! This app changed my life.

Lose it! is how I lost it!

Lose it! has premium features, but for the calorie counting you can use is free.

The app is very easy to use. You set up your goal weight, fill out your present weight, height and gender, how much you want to lose and how fast you want to lose your weight and the app calculates how many calories you are allowed to eat per day to accomplish your goal.

As you go through your day you simply enter the food you eat and estimate how much of it. After a while you get a feel for how to measure portions.

As a general rule the size of the average fist is the size of a portion. When it comes to meat, the size of your palm is equal to 3 ounces of meat.

Some of the nice features of Lose It!

One of the nice features included on Lose it! is the bar code reader. If you buy prepackaged food you simply scan the package and up pops the calories.

Also included is a recipe section. If you like making recipes from scratch which I do, then there is nothing better than this feature. You add all your ingredients and then estimate how many servings it divides into and it will calculate how many calories the recipe is per portion.

What is great about this is the next time you make this recipe you don’t have to do it again, the recipe is saved in your memory.

Another thing I like about this app is the size of its database. Basically whatever food you eat it is there. Every chain restaurant or convenience store I have been to, their menu is in the database.

My wife is a Filipina, so you can imagine I have had a lot of Filipino food. It’s no problem with this app. Even when I was in the Philippines I was able to keep record of everything I ate.

There has only been two or three times I couldn’t find what I was looking for in almost two and a half years. I have now kept track of my food for over 900 days and even when I no longer need to lose any weight I plan on using this app for maintenance purposes. It is just that easy to use.

What is keeping you from trying this app or one like it?