Lose It

I just found a new free app for my iPhone. To borrow a line from Charles Dickens, "It is the worst of apps, it is the best of apps." It is called "Lose It" and is sort of an electronic weight watcher's program.

The idea behind "Lose It" is to help you record the food you eat and the exercise you do every day. When you first start the application, it asks your weight, height, and gender. It then asks you your goal weight and gives you a safe estimate of how long it should take to get there. You are then ready to start inputing the food you eat as you eat it. Since I always have my iPhone with me, I just enter the information while I am chewing. Otherwise I might forget. Today I had some left-over Cashew Chicken with rice. While it was reheating in the microwave, I found a similar recepie in the program and had it calculate the calories.

The great thing about the program is you can see your calorie count as you go through the day. I started using it on Sunday and was 7 calories under my daily budget. Yesterday I went skiing for an hour at lunch and watched an additional 500 calories get added to my alotment. I only used a portion of them and went to bed with calories to spare.

You can probably see why it is the best of apps. As for why it is the worst, I feel hungry all day long. Given the temptation of snacking, it is too much work to enter the snack in the program and so I have cut down on those extra meals. I also am more careful about what I eat. The kids all had donuts and hot chocolate this morning for breakfast. I ate a donut but had to pass on the cocoa as I didn't want to start my day with too many calories used. Instead I drank water. What fun is water and donuts?

I love to eat and it probably shows a bit too much. My hope is that I can actually get down to my goal weight by April. Several of my cycling buddies have been using the program for a couple of weeks now and they have all lost weight. I probably should thank them for showing me the app, but I'm hungry and my next meal isn't for a couple more hours. I really hate those guys.