Logging Food by Scanning Bar Codes in Lose It!

When I originally wrote about Lose It!, a free (and fairly awesome) weight and exercise logging iPhone app, there were a number of things it had to make the entry of foods quick. For example, you can do any of the following to speed entry:

1. Choose from your recently logged foods rather than searching it's huge database of foods.
2. Enter a meal by finding a previous where you had the same menu and selecting that meal.
3. Create a "recipe" from several different foods that you eat together and give it a name. Later, simply choose that recipe and you get the total calories, fat, carbs, protein, etc. of all the foods in that recipe.
4. If you're sitting in front of a computer, use the Lose It! web site, where you can take advantage of a full-sized keyboard.

Some time after I wrote that post, Lose It! added another feature to speed up logging. This feature was its best yet and one that I only recently started using: the ability to log food by scanning a bar code using the iPhone's camera. Obviously this only works on packaged food--which is sometimes not the best for you--but it's a real time saver. It even found foods that were not in it's own database by searching. I'm not sure why that is but it even found my Buffalo Rock Diet Ginger Ale, a local favorite here in Birmingham, which you'll never find by searching foods in the app.

So, if you are looking to lose weight this year, using Lose It! to stay within a calorie budget is a great way to go. Now that you can log foods by scanning bar codes, I've taken away your excuse that you don't have time to log your foods.