After hearing my sister and friends commenting about losing weight recently, I decided it was time for me to do the same thing. My weight had pretty much stabilized, but I was at the heaviest I had ever been. I asked them how they were doing it and got several different responses. One stopped eating fast food for lunch, another started exercising more. My sister also mentioned that she was using an app on her iPhone. It's called Lose It! She told me about this a few months ago and I kind of brushed it off. I mean come on, who needs an iPhone app to lose weight? Apparently I do. I went to the App Store to check it out. It was free so I downloaded it and entered my info.
It's a simple app to use. You enter your age, weight, height, goal weight and select how fast you want to lose weight. You have option of anything from maintaining to losing 2 pounds a week. Once you make your choice, it tells you when you will be down to your goal weight and how many calories you're allowed each day. Then all you do is enter what you eat and how much exercise you do. They make that easy as well. They have tons of different foods built into the program including chain restaurants, fast food and most packaged food from the supermarket. If you eat something that isn't listed, you can simply add it and it's nutritional values. You enter items for each meal and there is a separate section for snacks. You do the same thing for exercise. Find your activity (running, house cleaning, kissing, snow shoveling, etc...), how vigorous the activity was and duration. The calories you burn get added to your daily allotment.
The app mainly tracks your caloric intake, but can also show fat, saturated fat, protein, cholesterol, sodium and carbs. You can add your friends to share results or help each other along. This can be done via e-mails, Twitter or Facebook. The app will even send you reminders if forget to log your activities.
My goal was to lose 15 pounds so I set it to lose 2 lbs/wk, but thought that wouldn't allow me enough calories every day, so after the first day I switched it to 1.5 lbs/wk. I found myself coming under my daily allotment almost every day (it also tells you how many calories you're under for the week). Part of this was from adding exercise, but a big part of it was that I started paying attention to portion size because I had to enter everything. I actually ended up losing just over 4 pounds in the first week and have lost 12 pounds in 4 weeks. I'm still going and will continue to use the app even after hitting my goal. I'm actually looking forward to losing more than my original goal of 15 pounds.
Did I need this app to lose weight? No, I've lost weight before, but when I had lost it before, I found myself going right back to bad habits and eating too much. I don't find myself being hungry during the day, which was one of my big worries. I get more than enough to eat and feel so much better about myself. I highly recommend this app not just to anyone who wants/needs to lose weight, but to anyone who just wants to maintain their weight.
Friday, April 16, 2010 at 5:54PM