Quick Calorie Counting Info

There are a variety of different versions of calorie tracking applications that can be added to your smartphone. Among those popular are My Fitness Pal, Lose It!, Calorie Counter, The Daily Burn, and The Daily Plate.
The programs allow you to search for what foods you ate throughout the day, how much of a food you ate, and what meal you had it for. Not only will it track your calorie intake, but it will also monitor fat, carbohydrates, protein, and other nutritional qualities depending on the application. Another perk of most of the applications is that they allow you to track your weight loss progress. This is a useful tool because it can teach users that weight gain or loss directly correlates with the types of foods you eat. And, since it’s on YOUR phone, you should probably not lie to yourself about what you ate. The more honest you are, the more you will learn from your mistakes and see results.

I personally use The Daily Burn, and before that I used Livestrong.com/thedailyplate. I love using these applications for many reasons, but especially because when you do overeat, you feel really guilty inputting it into the calorie counter. So, the next day, you will hopefully be more inclined to eat healthy. Over time, you will see a change in your eating habits because you will learn just how many calories are in certain foods. For instance, I don’t believe I will ever eat short rib or macaroni and cheese again.

Another benefit of calorie tracking applications is the option to input what fitness you accomplish each day. However, this is something that still needs to be improved, because the applications are not completely accurate on the amount of calories burned for each exercise. The counters do not seem to take your current weight into account when calculating the calories. However, the fitness aspect of these applications is a great way to estimate how much you burn throughout the day. Also, the categories are sort of general. You can’t really put “ten situps” in the search and expect something to come up. I actually don’t use the fitness portion of my application. I feel that it’s too inaccurate to rely on.

Here’s an image of my Nutrition intake on The Daily Burn.

This website elaborates further on applications that specifically iPhone users can download. They have way more apps that I didn’t even mention. So, you better be downloading at least one of them right now if you haven’t already.

More posts to come Friday!