Lose It! App
A few years ago, I was on a collection of medications that made me gain 20lbs in one month. I'll give you a second to let that sink in. TWENTY POUNDS IN ONE MONTH. As you might imagine, it was horrifying. I like to think that it wasn't that noticeable to the outside world (and I will tell myself that until the day I die), but I felt terrible and had major body image issues. It was a dark time. I can only talk about this now because I've lost those 20lbs, and continue to lose weight. (I like to refer to weight loss as "getting down to my driver's license weight.") How did I lose those pesky pounds? The Lose It! iphone app.
You may be disappointed to hear that exercising and counting calories worked for me. You were expecting a miracle pill? Lap band surgery? Sorry, I did it the old fashioned way, and there's a reason why: IT WORKS. But sometimes it can really suck.Who wants to carry around a notebook and write down everything they eat? Or keep an excel spreadsheet of their exercise to calorie ratio? It's all just so complicated and exhausting and it makes you want to curl up on the couch with a huge chocolate chip cookie. At least that's how I feel.
Enter Lose It! It's an easy way to keep track of all that boring stuff, and help you stick to your weight loss plan. You put in all your info (height, weight, age, etc), how much you want to lose, and how quickly you want to lose it (1lb a week, 1.5lbs a week...). Then through an act of app magic, you're presented with your weight loss plan. It tells you how many calories you can eat a day, and an approximate date of when you will reach your goal weight. Then all you have to do is put in what you eat and how much you exercise each day, and don't go over your allotted calories. Does this sound like the Weight Watchers point system? Yes. They're basically the same. But Lose It! is FREE, and their library of foods is much more extensive (so I've heard).
The thing I love most about Lose It! is that you can get more calories, or stay under your calories, by exercising. Say you have 1,300 calories a day, and you've already used 1,300 and it's not even dinner time. You can exercise, and the calories burned will be subtracted from your calorie count, giving you more calories to "spend." So let's say you went on the elliptical for 40 minutes and it burned 300 calories, now you're at 1,000 calories and you can eat some dinner and still stay under budget.
As I mentioned before, Lose It! has a huge library of foods. They even have a thingy where you can scan the barcode of a food and it pops up right there on your screen (this is my new favorite thing). Lose It! also has a huge library of restaurant foods, and more are added all the time. I'll sometimes plan out my lunch or dinner by looking up a restaurant in Lose It! and seeing how many calories are in, say, chicken noodle soup vs a ham sandwich at Panera. And I can do it all from my phone!
The Lose It! app is available for iPhone, Android, and if you don't have one of these phones, you can do it all on the Lose It! website.
Lose It! App: Free