Livestrong.com Calorie Tracker
by Eric March on November 3, 2008 at 12:49 pm
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App Name: Livestrong.com Calorie Tracker
Developer: Livestrong.com
Category: Health & Fitness
I’m fat. Not tremendously fat, but I’ve got a paunch. I’ve got 40lbs I want to shed, a rather sedentary lifestyle, and a congenital defect in my willpower genes. Thus, the potential for losing weight for me is as next to nothing as makes no odds — unless I have some kind of help, be it personal or virtual. Livestrong.com — yeah, those guys that make the trendy silicone bracelets — have come up with a rather nice calorie tracker that may be just the helper.
The fact of the matter is, no matter how many hundreds of fad diets, pills or “miracle” solutions turn up, no one is ever going to lose weight unless they make lifestyle choices that primarily include fundamental changes in your eating habits and possibly a little bit of exercise to help burn off some extra calories. Yeah, counting calories has always sucked, but guess what? It’s that or liposuction — and don’t think the latter is permanent either. If you keep eating the same crap, you keep gaining weight. Welcome to biology 101.
With the Livestrong.com Calorie Tracker, you can set up a free personal account (required to keep track of your preferences, weight and calorie tracking, as well as keeping track of our overall weight goal) and use that to catalog your daily caloric intake in order to keep track of how much you’ve eaten and how many calories are left to consume for the day if you want to stay on target.
But you needn’t actually count the calories. Livestrong.com fortunately have a large database of over 450,000 food items — produce, meats, canned goods, frozen goods, you name it. But even better, they have an extensive list of items from restaurants and fast food establishments all over North America (and possibly elsewhere) — something that’s all too often missing from calorie counters that just list raw ingredients. Hitting McD’s? Carl’s Jr.? Tim Horton’s? They’ve got the goods on just how bad some of those items are. Check out the screenshot — yes, those are my entries. That Tim Horton’s raisin bran muffin has damn near 400 calories. That’s about 1/5th the average person’s daily caloric requirement! However, on the good side, bran muffins do a good job of making you feel full for a long period of time, so absent the desire to snack it can work out as a net loss (of calories) for someone like me who is a compulsive snacker. I didn’t actually have a Tim Horton’s raisin bran muffin though; I had a bakery dark bran muffin, but that’s the closest I could find and it’s probably not too far off the mark, calorie-wise.
As you eat, you can search its online database, pick whatever you’re stuffing your face with (or the nearest equivalent), get details on it, and tap “I ate this” to simply add its calorie count to your daily allotment.
Day by day, the app will track your progress and give you an approximation of how your weight should be progressing (or regressing) using a line graph.
Yeah, it’s a bit unscientific and may not be completely accurate if the database doesn’t contain the food items you’re actually eating, but it can be close enough to provide the sort of assistance you need if you want to drop a spare tire and a chin or two. I’m actually going to give this thing a try and see if it manages to help me accomplish some weight loss.
The prorgam does have a bit of a bug though; I did notice that if I put the device into sleep mode, it lost its ability to connect to the net (over 3G anyway). I had to quit and reload before it would work properly. I’ve seen this occur in a few apps actually, so it doesn’t seem to be a completely uncommon thing.
At any rate, overall it’s not at all a bad little app. To be honest I haven’t tried any of the others so I don’t have anything with which to accurately compare it, but based on my knowledge of what you usually get with apps like this, it does provide a useful and fairly broad service to anyone looking to lose (or even gain) weight.
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