iPhone App of the Week – Lose It!

This week’s app is near and dear to my heart because it has helped myself and my loved ones to get healthier and lose weight.  If you haven’t figured it out from the title, Lose It is an application dedicated to helping people get healthy and lose weight.  It is a nutrition, calorie and exercise tracker that can help you stay on track when trying to cut back.  There are quite a few apps in the app store but Lose It is number one and it’s in that spot for a reason.  Lose it helps you set attainable goals and track your progress toward those goals. So what keeps Lose It in the top spot in the area of Healthcare and Fitness?

Easy Breezy Setup

Setup couldn’t be easier.  When you open the application it will ask you what your current weight is and what your goal weight is.  After that you can enter how quickly you would like to lose the weight.  This is where Lose It starts to stand out from the rest of the weight loss apps.  Lose It gives you have the option to lose weight at a rate of anywhere from 1/2 pound per week to 2 pounds per week.  The fact that it doesn’t go over that 2 pound limit is smart because losing more than 2 pounds per week over a long period of time is very difficult, unhealthy and not a reasonable goal.  A nice extra here is that Lose It will give you an estimated date to reach your goal weight according to the weight loss pace you chose.  After entering the information the app calculates exactly how many calories you can take in everyday to meet your goal, this is your daily calorie budget and it’s the thing you are going to keep track of most when using this application.

It Remembers Everything

With Lose It you are able to enter all of the food you are consuming throughout the day.  When entering this information you have the option to choose from a list of brand name foods from supermarkets or restaurants or you can enter the information manually.  If you choose the manual route, Lose It will remember that food and it’s nutrition facts so that if you eat it again you can access it quickly.  You can also create your own recipes and include calorie content for the recipe as a whole.  Lose Italso remembers what meals you ate so if, for example, you eat a bowl of Raisin Bran, a glass of non-fat milk and a grapefruit for breakfast every morning, when you enter the information you have to option to use previous meals, just pick the breakfast meal from the day before and you’re set to go.  You only have to enter all of the separate food items once.

Graphs, Graphs, Graphs

Graphs are a great way to monitor your progress toward your end goal.  The opening screen of Lose It gives you a visual representation of how many calories you’ve eaten so far in the day, as well as how many calories you have remaining.  In the “Goals” section you can view your goal weight, your daily calorie budget and a graph that displays a line to show your goal weight and a line to show your actual weight.  It’s very satisfying watching your actual weight move closer to your goal weight, the graphs provide another motivator to stay on track.

Exercise

If you want to lose weight and be successful diet is not enough, you have to include some sort of exercise into your daily routine.  Lose It helps you track your exercise as well.  With over 100 different preset activities you’ll be hard pressed to find something that’s not on the list, if you do come across an activity that isn’t on the list you have the option to enter it manually (and yes that information gets remembered as well).

Calories aren’t the only things it tracks

While the default setting for Lose It is to track just calories you can adjust the settings to track nutrients as well.  This makes the app even more useful for those who want to keep track of things other than or in addition to calories.  Other items tracked include: total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates, fiber, sugar and protein.

The Best Part

There are so many great feature this application has to offer but the best part about it?  It’s FREE!  Yep, that’s right, you get all of the above mentioned features in a compact, fast, smooth running, stable application for free.  Really, if you’re trying to get healthy and lose weight you don’t have anything to lose by putting this app on your phone.  It’s helped me lose 20 pounds in 2.5 months, how can it help you?

Are you using this application?  Do you love it?  Hate it?  Share with us in the comments.