Tap & Track - Calorie, Weight & Exercise Tracker

Forget baseball, weight loss is America's real past time. The weight loss industry, a $50 billion per year industry, is full of diet books and voodoo nutrition scams. From the South Beach diet to the Atkins diet, people all over the country think that they can somehow trick their bodies into not gaining any weight. The real trick to dieting is to eat less calories than you burn. That's it! Create a calorie deficit and, unless you have a medical issue, you will drop the weight. Obviously eating healthy foods is a plus, but I've seen too many cheeseburger diets work to think that healthy eating alone will make you lose weight. Just eat less than you burn.

Now keeping track of this can become a chore if you aren't careful, so a simple calorie tracker can become a critical tool in your weight loss goals. Some people keep these trackers on paper or on their computers, but nothing is more handy than keeping it on an iPhone. Instead of using notepad app, Tap & Track is designed to specifically tackle this task.

The app itself is quite simple, with no crazy advice given or products being marketed to you. All you have to do is enter your height and weight, how much you want to lose a week, and your total goal weight… and you are on your way. Based on the information given in your profile, the app determines how much you burn in a given day by doing nothing, and then keeps track of how many calories you eat in a given day. Along the way, you can add exercise, which boosts your total calories allowed by choosing a workout in the list of available workouts, along with how long you did the workout. Just about every workout that I've ever done is included in the list, so as long as you aren't training in Parkour, you're in luck.

The biggest problem with the average calorie tracker, other than the fact that they make you feel bad for eating, is that it is typically impossible to correctly enter the calories you eat. The typical person doesn't know how many calories are in the eggs that they are eating, so eventually the trackers become deeply flawed or they just get tossed out. Fortunately, Tap & Track not only has built in foods that you can choose from, it also has a database of 405 restaurants with their nutritional info right there for you. I'll admit that the food database is a great idea, but after a few uses, I really began to question its accuracy.

Being from Texas, I have this unnatural attraction to Chili's. I'm not sure why people from Texas like Chili's, but they all do. One of the best appetizers there are the boneless buffalo wings which have been on the menu for quite a while now. I found the boneless buffalo wings in the app, and was shocked when I found that it says that they only have 125 calories. Upon further inspection I found that this was only for one serving, which is 11 ounces, but how much is 11 ounces? And then how much chicken is in 11 ounces of chicken fried steak? If it were up to me, the app would give the calorie content for the whole order, and then divide it up by how much you eat.

Besides this gripe, which I admit is quite large, the app is very well made. If you are willing to do a bit of finagling with trying to find correct nutritional content of things, the app would be amazing. Everything in the app is quite smooth, almost Apple-like, so using it is a joy. If a calorie tracker is what you need, and you aren't eating out much (effectively eliminating my serving size gripe), Tap & Track is definitely a winner.