Smart phones (iphone, blackberry, droid etc.) are all the rage now.  Since I just got back from Iraq and needed a new phone anyway, I got an iphone.  I had no idea how cool the apps were!  So, I decided to try out a free fitness app called “Lose It!”  This is a calorie counting and exercise tracking program.

It is pretty easy to use; I just plugged in my height/weight etc. and decided to shoot for 1/2 lb weight loss per week.  It spat out a target of 2328 calories per day.  Any exercise you do gives you that much more calories you can eat that day. So, if a 45 workout burns 300 calories, I could eat 2628 that day and still be on track.  It has an extensive list of exercises and activities to include chores like mowing the lawn.  It doesn’t have anything to really replicate high intensity training like sprinting or kettlebells so I just used high intensity circuit or weight training.  You can create custom exercises, so I created a custom workout for my Tacfit Commando bodyweight routine.

The food tracker is pretty extensive and includes lots of foods and restaurants.  More are added with updates, and you can create your own custom foods for stuff you eat a lot that isn’t in there.

The results?  Well, I have to admit, I didn’t actually care as I was just trying it out.  My starting weight was 187.5.  My first week I was 2600 calories over my weekly budget and my weight crept up a 1/2 lb.  My next week I was 3,000 over. The week after that, 1,600. The next 2 weeks I was 445 under and 318 over respectively.  The end result after 5 weeks is I lost 3 1/2 lbs down to 184, so it actually worked!   That’s an average of .7 lbs/week.

It was a hassle at first to enter everything, but it quickly became a habit.  The inputs, esp. setting up the program, were less than ideal since it didn’t take into account your activity level.  However, a serious user would adjust it to fit them better.  It did give me a good idea of how many calories I am actually consuming and how that affects my weight and to what degree.  I now know my maintenance level is about 2600/day or so and less than that will have me losing.

Surprisingly, even though I was just messing around with it, (not seriously trying to lose weight), it still worked because I started to want to hit the target and liked seeing green bars on the daily graph and not going over.  So, if you are serious about losing weight, I would definitely give one of these free apps a try, at least while you are on the weight loss and or exercise program.

-Brian