Losing it

For the past three weeks I’ve been tracking my diet with a free iPhone app called Lose It! (iTunes link). It’s not a perfect program, but I highly recommend it.

Here’s how it works in a nutshell: When you first start Lose It! it asks your weight, age, height, gender, and your goal weight (mine is 190 pounds). Then it asks you how many pounds you’d like to lose per week, from one half to two (I picked 1½), and comes up with a daily calorie budget for you (mine started at 2,099). Then, when you eat or exercise, you punch in what you ate or what you did, and it subtracts or adds calories to your budget appropriately.

The heart of the Lose It! experience is the built-in food database, which includes some thousands of home-cooked, supermarket, and restaurant foods. It’s super-easy to use, but if Lose It! doesn’t live up to its eponymous promise for you, it’s the database that you’ll blame. It’s just not that comprehensive, and there are a lot of odd holes in it—grilled chicken breast is absent, for instance. Most of my tastes are as banal as that, and I find myself manually entering about half the foods I eat.

Despite that, Lose It! works for me. Partly because I don’t mind googling half my meals, but mostly, I think, because it brings accountability to my eating habits. Now I know that if I eat that second delicious cupcake I’m going to have to make a note of it, and it’s going to subtract from my budget and, if I’ve already eaten enough today, maybe push me into the red. Even if the database and budget math weren’t accurate (and I  believe they are), Lose It! would still be valuable to me just by making me push a button every time I put something in my mouth.

What you’re really wondering, though, is “Does it work?” When you stick to your budget, yeah, it does. I’ve lost around four pounds in three weeks. Just under my pound-and-a-half goal, and that’s without any exercise on top of my usual regime of nada. At right you can see my three-week weight chart.

You can see that for the last week my weight has gone up and down, trending pretty horizontally. Which, for the price of zero dollars, I’m completely happy with. I’m feeling healthier, I’m not gaining weight, and I just don’t feel like eating as much. Lose It! doesn’t even sport any advertisements or branding, which is great, but makes me wonder if its makers aren’t working on a for-pay follow-up. If they are, I’ll buy it.