Perhaps you’re getting ready for bikini season and would like a little assistance from your smartphone with some apps to help you diet. I’ve often joked that my iPhone can do everything for me except iron my clothes and find me a husband! Just when you think you’ve found the greatest app yet, another comes along, and another. One of my favorite types of apps are healthy living apps. Not only do these apps teach you about monitoring your food intake, but they also teach you about nutrition. Food is about more than calories, and these apps to help you diet show you ways to eat healthier, and integrate exercise. Now, unless someone designs an app to do the exercise for us, these 7 apps are pretty hard to beat.
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1. Calorie Counter
itunes.apple.com
To drop pounds, staying motivated is key and Calorie Counter’s app is one of the best apps to help you diet and stay motivated. This is possibly one of the most powerful nutrition aids in the app world. It doesn’t only track your calories, but also your exercise. To boot, it has a library of over 400,000 packaged food items it recognizes so you are able to input your information in and get accurate, precise results in calorie, carb, fat and protein contents. You can scan the barcode of products at the store to get an analysis or the food, or just type in the first few letters of the product to get a reading. This app also encourages behavioral change and helps you stay encouraged and motivated. Cost is Free.
2. Fooducate Nutrition Scanner
itunes.apple.com
If you’re wondering if that cereal that says it is fat free and organic is actually healthy for you, there’s an app for that! Fooducate scans a food’s UPC item and not only tells you the calorie count, but also tells you everything you want to know about the nutrition of the food. If it’s high in sodium or sugar, this app will let you know. Each food is also graded so you can strive to achieve all A’s on whatever goes into your shopping cart and into your mouth! Now, that’s something we could all appreciate. Don’t be embarrassed to go scanning away at the store with this app. If people stare at you, share the app with them, and more than likely, they’ll be using it too! Cost is $3.99
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3. Lose It!
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This app is a diet program all in itself. It is designed to help you learn how to exercise, teach you about nutrition, monitor your calorie intake and output, plus tell you how to reach your goals. It also customizes a personal nutrition plan based on your needs and gives you support from an online community and personal coaches. I actually have this app and use it mainly for finding out nutrition information in different foods. I love it for the ease of use, which is hard to find in some apps like this one. I like to focus on more than just the calorie content of my foods, and more about the quality. This app helps you do that, and gives you a personalized plan, which is hard to beat for the price. Cost is $3.99.
4. Diet Point
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If you need a more simple app for dieting help, Diet Point may be the answer you’re looking for. This app is not only free, but comprises one of the largest lists of dieting plans in the world of all the dieting apps out there. This app also has the largest mobile weight-loss forum. It comes with a Body Mass Index (BMI) and Basal Rate Metabolism (BMR) calculators to not only tell you what your metabolism is up to, but also how much lean body mass you have. My favorite thing about this app is that once you choose the diet plan you want to follow, you are then given meal ideas, meal schedules and a grocery list to follow! Who could want more than that? Well, to beat all that, this app even tells you when to eat so you don’t miss a meal when you’re busy! I would recommend this app to anyone who asked me about losing weight.
5. My Fitness Pal
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Though most of us have heard of it by now, MyFitnessPal deserves a spot on my list for the top 7 apps to help you diet. It was rated the best weight loss and fitness app of all time this past year. This is one app you don’t want to download and forget about. It really can help your weight loss efforts through its comprehensive lifestyle assistance. It gives you the calorie content of your food, complete nutrition analysis of your food, gives you a personalized diet plan based on your goals, provides you with exercises for beginners and progresses as you move further along into your health journey, and best of all, it automatically loads all of your information onto the online database so you can access your information anytime on a computer or tablet. This app has the largest database of foods and features over 2 million foods listed, plus it has a barcode scanner to use at the store that works offline. Hard to beat that, right? Well, it gets even better. Cost is free!
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6. Slimkicker
itunes.apple.com
Well if you want an app that not only helps you lose, but rewards you with a prize too, then you’re in luck! There’s an app for that too. SlimKicker is one of the best rated apps for dishing out rewards for weight loss. I also like the neat challenges it gives users that make dieting seem like more of a game and less like a chore. For instance, dieters can log in their food entries, and are also given motivators and challenges such as “Give up soda for a week.” If they complete the challenge, they can be entered to win a special prize, such as $100 giftcard to Zappos.com, as an example. This app keeps track of your fitness and exercise routines, keeps track of your calories and diet plan, gives you meal ideas, and provides you with challenges. It is simple to use and the cost is free.
7. What RU Eating
itunes.apple.com
I saved my favorite app for last. If you buy processed food, you need this app, especially if you’re wanting to lose weight. As a nutritionist, nothing upsets me quite like finding a new product at the store that proclaims it is healthy, and then turning it over to read the ingredients list to find it is really pure garbage. Don’t be fooled by false labeling or fancy marketing tactics. Sugar used to be sold with a “fat-free” label on it, but does that make it healthy? No, of course not! Well, this app can help you see the light behind how false labels can be. Wonder what those ingredients are you can’t pronounce? This app will tell you what they are and if health risks are associated with them. A common additive in processed food is MSG and it can have over 100 different names through careful labeling tactics. Now, you don’t have to guess what’s in your food. With What RU Eating, you can now know exactly. This keeps your diet on track and your health in better overall form. Cost is free.
The one important thing to remember about these apps is they can’t help you if you don’t use them! Be sure to make them a part of your daily routine if you want to actively lose weight. They not only help you eat better, but most of them send you reminders to log in your information for the day so you don’t forget. Make these apps to help you diet a part of your day just like checking your email and you’ll be on your way to success. What are your favorite apps to help you diet or eat better?
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