Losing It: Losing Weight with Your iPhone

I could stand to lose some weight, so like many I started doing something about it. I'm not a fitness or diet expert but I've found out a few things about myself. I don't like to "go on a diet" and major restrictions on what I eat don't help me because they are unsustainable. There are things I like to eat that I don't want to completely give up. What I want is to bring moderation to what I eat and how much.
Losing weight ultimately is about taking in less calories than you burn. This is where Lose It! comes in. Lose It! is a free iPhone app that allows you to log your meals and your exercise, a technique that I've found works and allows me to eat mostly what I want as long as I don't overdue it. It's not following a diet as much as it is following a caloric budget. For me it works. When I make a reasonable budget (based on losing a pound a week) and stay within that budget, I lose weight.

Lose It! is very feature rich, more than many apps that will cost you money. It has:

• A huge database of foods and exercises so you don't have to find out and enter calories.
• Let's you add and reuse your own foods and exercises if you don't find them in its database.
• Allows you to add friends for accountability and encouragement. Friends can see how you are doing against your budget, how much weight you're losing, etc. (Only friends can see this stuff so you can restrict it to just yourself by just not adding friends.) It even will email you and your friends a summary or detailed report eac week if you want it to.
• Let's you combine common foods into recipes for quick entry.
• Let's you add a past meal as a current meal if you're eating the same thing again (leftovers, for example).
• It is one of those apps that has it's own web site, where you can log your meals if you are already sitting in front of a computer. In fact you could just use the web site exclusively but logging on an iPhone is convenient when you are out and about.

If you need to lose weight, your iPhone can be a tool to help you. Although losing weight is never easy, using an app like Lose It! definitely helps.

(I've lose 2.4 pounds using Lose It! in the first two weeks of 2011. Last year I lost close to 10 pounds. I would have lost more had I kept up the discipline of logging my food and exercise.)