Favorite Four - Weight Loss Apps
There is a massive industry related to losing weight, but most doctors agree eating healthy foods in moderation along with exercise is the real key to weight loss success. If being healthy, not just thin, is the objective, quick dieting isn't the answer. The permanent solution lies in making lifestyle changes that last. So we've compiled our favourite four apps to help track calories eaten and burned and find comprehensible nutritional information about foods for iPhone to make the journey to fitness a little easier.
Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker by MyFitnessPal
This app boasts the largest database of foods - over a million - and provides a calorie count along with information on fats, protein, sugars, fiber and other nutritional facts. But the app does a lot more. It allows dieters to enter entire meals, or add favorite foods, even recipes for fast access to comprehensive and useable information. The app also includes a web companion to track your food intake online and it syncs with the app. There is a barcode scanner for packaged foods, and even push notifications if a user forgets to log a meal. On the fitness end there are more than 350 exercises included for both cardio and strength training, and the app keeps track of calories expended. Create goals, generate reports and start shedding those pounds.
Fooducate Plus
Fooducate is all about helping those on a diet, for weight loss or any health reason, make wise choices at the supermarket. With a database of over 200,000 unique products, this app uses the iPhone camera to scan barcodes and then tells a user about what’s really in that can or box. It will reveal any veiled information from the use of chemical food colorings that may not be safe to excessive trans-fats while also highlighting that item's health benefits. The app allows for side-by-side product comparisons and even provides healthier alternative suggestions. The free version is ad supported.
Weightbot – Track your Weight in Style
If regular apps are too lo-tech, how about a weight-tracking robot? Weightbot is weight loss - or gain - for geeks. Users just enter their goal, their current body specs, and the app calculates their BMI and shows progress on a graph. Rotate clockwise to view weight loss progress over time, or turn the iPhone the other way to view the goal and expected arrival date.
Dotti’s Food Score
We have apps to count calories in raw foods, packaged products, even favorite recipes, but most of us do a lot of our eating out. Getting the nutritional information from a restaurant menu can be difficult and even embarrassing. Dotti’s Food Score uses information from Dotti’s Weight Loss Zone web site to serve up the skinny on almost 600 restaurants. The app has information on the most popular food chains, gets regular updates, and is particularly well integrated with the Weight Watchers program, offering scores based on their program.