Image via CrunchBase
Recording what you eat plays a major role when it comes to weight loss. It makes you become more ‘mindful’ about what you are eating and it can help to identify areas of your diet that need to be worked on. Phone apps are great for this as it means foods and drink eaten can be inputted on the go and there are no extra pieces of pens and paper involved!
Myfitnesspal is one of the biggest and best food diary apps around. The app allows users to input what they’ve eaten or drunk either by using their data base of nutritional data or by scanning bar-code on packets. Calories are instantly totted up and worked out per meal, leaving you in the knowledge of how many calories you have left for later in the day. The app also gives calorie targets for weight loss, maintenance or gain and allows users the option of inputting in exercise to see how many calories were burnt off. The app isn’t without it’s ‘down-sides’ thought; most of the nutritional data is inputted by users, which means that calorie contents, especially of the pre-prepared ‘meals’ may be wrong. The best way to work the app is to take your meal back to the ingredients and input each in individually – users can create their own recipe collection which will save time for future meals. This app is free to all users and recommended by a leading uk dietitian from www.nicsnutrition.com.
Carbs and Cals is another app which allows users to track their food intake over the day. On the Iphone users can track calorie and carb intake while on android phone users can track protein and fat intake as well. The benefits of using carbs and cals is that the nutrition data has been inputted by the makers of the app accurately and pictures of the foods are also included – this means that it’s easy to estimate portions eaten. The app could be improved however with the addition of a bar-code scanner. Carbs and cals is available free for the ‘lite’ version and is priced at £3.99 for the full version.
MyPlate Calorie Tracker is an app from ‘livestrong’ and is also available in a free ‘lite’ version and full veriosn at £1.99. The app benefits from pictures of the foods eaten as well as support groups and forums. The app is user friendly and it really easy to navigate.
