Apps can help with New Year’s resolution

(Photo by Art Smith)
A typical Christmas day amount of food.

Please raise your hand if you ate too much turkey, dressing, noodles, ham, cake, pie or Christmas cookies last week. If your belt looks like it should be around a big red suit, please raise your hand. If your New Year’s resolution is to do something about it, please pick up your smart phone.

There are a number of smart phone apps that you can download to help you track your daily food intake and record other key metrics that can help motivate you on your journey to a healthy lifestyle.

Many of the available apps have the same basic function of recording what you eat. I tested many of them earlier this year and settled on one that I thought was the easiest to use.

Lose It! is a free app that gives you a few more functions if you pay a small fee, but many people choose to simply use the no cost option.

Lose it! makes food entry easy because it has a huge database of food. Type the name of a food and it will give you a list that you can pick from. If you are eating something that came from the grocery store, you can simply scan the bar code on the container it came in and it will load one serving of that food into the meal that you are logging.

Once loaded, it will add it to your daily calorie intake and break it down in terms of saturated fat, sodium, fiber, calories and macronutrients and show you where you stand in terms of your goals.

Most of us really don’t eat that many different foods, the app will quickly learn your regular choices, making it even easier to keep track.

You set your goals by indicating how much weight you want to lose or gain over a given period of time. Any calories you burn via exercise are used to determine how many more calories you should consume in order to stay on your plan.

You can also enter other measurements such as weight, water intake and blood pressure to see how they changed based on food consumed.

The app will gently remind you that you forgot to enter a meal.

I’m no different than anyone else; I used the app for several months earlier this year but then got lax in entering things. Just writing this column got me thinking about it and I stopped to enter the last few days of information.

Other apps will do basically the same thing as Lose It! — most also offer add ons, like inspirational articles and recipes. You may find you like some of the others better. They include MyFitnessPal, Calorie Counter — MyNetDiary and Nutrition Tracker: Foodnoms. They all claim to be the best; Only one of them will be the best for you.

I encourage you to download several, give them a spin, and then delete the ones you don’t plan on using.

Good luck with your New Year’s resolution; hopefully an app like Lose It! will make it a little easier to achieve your goal.

Art Smith is online manager of The Marietta Times and Parkersburg News and Sentinel. He can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com