Premium Weight Loss Using Your iPhone

I've written before on several occasions about Lose It! for the iPhone, a great tool for weight loss and one of the best free apps in the App Store. You can get a lot of help in meeting your fitness goals by using this app's free features but it has some premium features that are quite compelling if you need a little extra motivation in getting fit.

Challenges

These are a great motivational tool. Here is where Lost It! gets both social and competitive. You can compete with yourself, with others (the public or just certain friends), and even as groups toward some goal. For example, a challenge might be between teams of four on which team can lose the largest percentage weight. You can join existing challenges that others have created or create your own. The challenges can be public or private and you can invite your friends to join with you for added accountability and competition.

You can do all of this from within the app but I found it easier to find challenges on the Lose It! web site.

Goals

The only goal you can track in the free version is weight. However, you might want to track other things like blood pressure or waist size since weight alone is not an indicator of fitness.  You can also track toward goals that help you achieve fitness like exercise minutes, exercise calories, protein percentage of calories, carb percentage of calories, grams of fiber, etc. Many of these are tracked automatically for you log food and exercise, in which case, you don't need to do any extra work to keep track of them.

Meal Planning

I had always wanted to log foods a day or two ahead, something you can't do with the free account. (You can only log today and in the past in the free account.) The Premium version of Lose It! added the ability to log for future days. Logging ahead helps you plan for the days coming up so that if you really blow it today, you can plan how to make it up over the next several days, seeing what your calorie budget would look like if you had certain foods over those days.

Integration with Other Apps and Devices

Be active in your exercise but lazy in your logging with this feature of the premium version. There are a number of devices and apps listed on the Premium page that will automatically log exercise, weight, or blood pressure for you. I have my RunKeeper account hooked to Lose It! so that when I use my RunKeeper app to capture my walk or run, my exercise is automatically logged for me in Lose It! That's really nice.

At $39.99 a year, the features are probably worth it if you need more tools in your toolbox to ensure you are able to meet your fitness goals, such as losing those 20 lbs. that would get you back to a healthy size. That's less than $1 a week.