Full FeedAppletell reviews Lose It! for iPhone, iPod touch
Category: Healthcare and Fitness
Developer: Fit now
Minimum Requirements: iPhone OS 2.0
Compatibility: iPhone and iPod touch
File Size: 2.6 MB
Price: Free
Availability: Now
Version Reviewed: 1.2
The basic elements of any successful diet are watching what you eat and exercising. Lose It! is comprehensive (and free) program for journaling your calories: both the food you eat and exercise you do.
You start off by entering your current weight (and other relevant info, like your sex), followed by your goals. From there, Lose It generates a daily calorie budget. You enter the food you eat (subtracted from that number) along with any exercise you do (added to that number). By doing periodic weigh-ins, you can monitor your intake, and modify your habits to reach your weight goal.
I was really impressed with Lose It’s extensive library of food: not just general entries like say “steak” or “Peanut butter and jelly sandwhich,” but specific entries for brand name foods and restaurants. If you have the nutritional information for something that isn’t in the database, you can enter it yourself, and since I started using it, Fit Now has had one update where they added more restaurants.
And there’s the additional benefit of keeping a food diary: once I got into the habit of recording everything you eat, I’ve become more aware of snacking than I was before. Lose It also makes it easy to reenter food items I eat frequently by adding them to the “My Foods” menu.
The program has one annoyance: it frequently crashes when entering new food info. If I just entered the calories, then saved the entry, it was fine, but if I tried to input the full range of nutritional info, it crashed almost every time. A second problem (which isn’t really the fault of the program) is that if I eat something unusual, I end up entering my meals piece-by-piece: one turkey sandwich, one piece of avocado, and two strips of bacon on my TAB. But again, this just makes me more aware of what I’m putting into my body.
I haven’t been using Lose It long enough to notice any appreciable difference in my weight, but I think it is helping me eat healthier (by taking away the idea that I can “get away with” snacking) and exercising more (biking home the long way so I get more bonus calories). Its wide database of foods and free price tag make it a helpful tool for anyone looking to regulate their diet.
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Looks great, but the link doesn’t work for me - and I’ve searched for it through the App store and can’t find it.
on July 24, 2009 at 02:04 AM - LINKDavid,
Link works fine for me. If you search the App store for “Lose It” it’s the first thing that comes up.
on July 24, 2009 at 08:41 AM - LINKThanks for the review!
A quick comment- we believe that the crashing issue when adding custom foods (w/nutrients) was fixed in version 1.2 (it existing in version 1.1 and earlier when those versions are run on OS 3.0 phones/ipods). If you are still continuing to see this crash, I’d love to hear from you so I can investigate further.
If you do have sandwiches or such that you eat frequently, rather than enter all the ingredients each time, you can use recipes to create aggregate sets of foods that can be quickly added (e.g. turkey club instead of all the ingredients). Just an FYI in case its useful.
Thanks again for the review!
-charles
on July 24, 2009 at 09:43 AM - LINKI love it! I’ve installed it on my iPod touch and so far I am well impressed. People have told me about the calorie count thing before but it was too much work writing things down and trying to remember each time how many calories were in certain foods.
It takes a while to build up the list in terms of the food I eat but after a few weeks I think I’ll have most of the food I eat in the database so it will be easier and quicker to use.
on July 25, 2009 at 12:09 PM - LINKI have been using Lose It, and I have lost over 20 pounds! I LOVE this program!!!!!
on August 12, 2009 at 06:01 PM - LINK