How to Lose Weight with Your iPhone or iPod Touch

My favorite app for my iPod Touch is Lose It! by FitNow. This app is free and I find it to work better than a couple that I paid for. The goal of Lose It! is to help you succeed at weight loss by tracking your food intake and exercise.

The first time you use Lose It!, the program asks you to enter your current weight, goal weight, and how much you would like to lose each week. The program then calculates your daily calorie budget and the date that you will reach your goal weight if you stick with the plan.

I have previously tried to use similar programs on the internet but never stuck with it because I wasn't at my computer every time I ate something. I am able to keep my iPod with me at all times and track everything that I eat. Since I also bring it to the gym to listen to music, I am able to track my exercise and calories burned while I am there before I forget.

Adding food to the log is an enjoyable experience because of the large variety of options. You simply type in what you ate and several similar options come up so that you can pick the closest one. There is a whole section for brand name supermarket and restaurant foods. The restaurant list is helpful because I can use it to decide what to order and I am able to track calories on food that otherwise I would not have known information for. The program saves previous meals so it is quick to retrieve meals that you eat on a regular basis. There is also a recipe option which allows you to enter the ingredients you use in recipes to find the total calorie count for the meal.

Exercise tracking is very easy with Lose It! You simply touch "add exercise" and then select the exercise that you did, the amount of time you did it, and your intensity. The program then calculates the number of calories you burned. The library of exercises to choose from is huge, including sports, yard work, gym machines, and games. The exercises that you use frequently are saved in the "My Exercises" folder so that you are able to find them even faster. The amount of calories burned during your exercise is subtracted from your daily calorie budget. I like this because it shows that if I eat too much food one day all I need to do is exercise more to burn it off.

I really like this app because of the ease of use and the way it helps me to keep track of my daily calories. The log shows how many calories I have left for the day so I know if I can eat more or should work out longer to keep up with my goal. The app is nice to look at and has worked properly for me for weeks.