After a fantastic holiday and a lot of overindulging on my favorite foods, it’s now time I go back to my diet.  I’ve been on many diets in the past (the Zone, South Beach, etc.) and I cannot seem to stick to them.  3 summers ago, I kept a food log on my laptop and lost about 25 pounds.  I decided last Sunday (exactly 1 week ago) to start food logging again.  The only problem:  I didn’t want to haul my laptop to work to keep track of my daily food intake – I wanted something portable.  Luckily, I found an awesome (and FREE) iPhone application that does everything I want!  It’s called Lose It!

     When you first open the application, you enter your personal info (age, weight, height, goal weight, and how many pounds you want to lose per week).  It then tells you your daily calorie budget and approximately how long it will take you to reach your goal weight.  I log each of my meals and it keeps track of my calorie and nutrient intake (fat, sodium, carbs, etc.) for the day.  It also has a nice weekly overview of this info.  I can also enter my weight daily (if desired) and it graphs my progress.  I have lost 4.8 pounds since last Sunday.  Woo-Hoo!!  For me, this has been the only thing that works.  I can see how much I eat for breakfast, lunch, and my snacks and determine how much of my calorie budget I have left for dinner.  If needed, you can manually enter your food information in (the application will store it); however, it already has a lot of the brand name foods stored in the program.  It also has numerous restaurant foods saved in the database as well. Overall, this is an awesome app that I highly recommend!