A funny thing happened when I started using the iPhone app Lose It! to monitor my eating habits: my habits changed. Radically. Not that I don’t backslide sometimes, but all the dietary information, in context, is in my hand.
By entering my eating and exercise choices into Lose It!, I can see the progress I’m making in changing my behavior and make adjustments. For example, under the nutrients panel I saw that my sodium intake was off the charts (see my post about sodium and Trader Joe’s), even though I hardly ever put salt on my food. Looking through my food log, I saw that there were a few key entries that bumped up my sodium: can soup, veggie burgers (healthy?!), and a couple of other prepared foods.
watch your nutients
Good information, that’s what Lose It! can give you. Of course, having the information doesn’t guarantee you’ll change your behavior.
It took me a long time, a lot of starts and stops, advice from friends, and reading about healthy eating before I got to this point. And I’m at a different point than I have ever been before. I’m still learning, which makes me more interested than ever to continue on this weight loss journey.
Part of what makes Lose It! so good is that it makes collecting the important dietary and exercise behavior very easy. Keeping an eating log, or otherwise counting your calories, can be a total pain in the ass. Always going back to the label, writing the same information down every day, trying to track the nutrients … ahh, here’s a stick, poke my eyes out right now.
But if you know that your diet is a problem, you must log your eating behavior; without having that information in-hand, ready to review and self evaluate, you will not change your behavior.
Lose It! solves the problem of tedious calorie logging by having an extensive database of foods, including brand name and restaurant food. It usually takes me about a minute to enter a meal in the database (and about 5 seconds to add an exercise). The more you use the app, the easier it is to use because both your meals and custom foods are added to the database under “my food”. For example, I have a couple of standard breakfasts that I eat. I just look under “previous meals” and add one of those.
The Daily Plate offers the same sort of tool, though it’s Web based, which I don’t find as convenient as the iPod in my hand (of course, you need the iPod Touch or iPhone). In my life, what made the difference was not just having a tool to count calories, it was having a convenient tool.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about my other favorite iPhone health app: iFitness.
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