From the Dark Side
by Tiny Ruisch
In 2005, when I moved South to Louisiana, I weighed nearly half of a ton. A year later, on September 28, 2006, I was diagnosed with diabetes witch turned out to be a good thing. I started to watch what went into my mouth, lost more than 200 pounds and weighed about 240. I’m not trying to brag because I gradually started to regain some pounds and went back up to 276, which I maintained for a year or so. I finally decided that it was time to get serious again. I’ve found a great Android application that has been a great diet assistant.
Lose It! helps you set a daily calorie budget, track your food and exercise, and stay motivated to make smarter choices and achieve your goal. After you install the application, you need to input your age, gender, height, weight and an e‑mail address. Then you need to decide on a goal weight and how much you would like to lose each week. The program then generates a daily calorie goal and calculates how long it will take you to achieve your weight loss.
After setup is complete, opening the application shows a screen with five tabs. The “My Day” tab shows your total calorie budget for the day, how many calories you’ve consumed and a chart showing how many grams of protein, carbohydrates and fat you’ve consumed. There is also an over/under budget chart for the week.
The “Log” tab is where the strength of the program is. In this section, you enter all of your consumed food and exercises. You can enter foods by searching the database, scanning a bar code, selecting from your personal food list, copying a previous meal or entering a recipe. The food list is extensive and includes almost all of the restaurant chains. So far, I haven’t found any foods not in the database. Foods that you have previously consumed are saved in your “My Foods” list. This makes them a lot easier to find the next time. This is also the section where you record exercises. When you enter an exercise, the total calories burned is added to your daily budget. The more you exercise, the more you can chew and still lose those extra pounds. As with the foods, there is an extensive data base that includes some obscure activities such as croquet, curling, juggling and many more. Activities are saved in your “My Exercises” data base for easy retrieval. If you like to do something like doing jumping jacks while roller skating, you can create a custom exercise.
The “Motivate” tab is mostly for social networking. Here you can create and accept challenges, post to Facebook, etc. I haven’t used this feature.
The “Goals” tab is where you can view charts and other information about your diet plan.
Finally, the “More” tab is where you set your application preferences, manage you Lose It! Account and access premium features. Although some of these are tempting, I don’t think I’ll be signing up because of the cost of $39.99 annually. Some of the tempting premium items are tracking blood glucose, blood pressure, nutritional data, connecting to monitoring devices and much more. I’ve found that the free app is good enough for me.
If you want to lose a few pounds or are are just interested in tracking your calories, I recommend you give this program a try. You can find more information on the Lose It! Website. Download Lose It! From the Google Play Store.