West Long Branch, NJ (The Verge)- By now most of us know there’s an app for everything. Need a flashlight? You got it. Have banking to do? You got it. Want to throw birds of different shapes and sizes at some pigs? You got that, too. Some apps are more useful than others, but calorie tracking applications are being downloaded at a rapid pace, thanks to the importance Americans have been placing on dieting recently.
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.
A further 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.
Many of these applications are free, and some offer upgrades if you want to obtain the free version of the application. For example, The Daily Burn has a Food Scanning feature, but you must pay $2.99 a month to be able to use it. This may be worth it for some people who do not have time to manually input what they ate, but the scanning feature is not entirely necessary. All of these applications have qualities that can be taken advantage of without having to pay a fee.
This website elaborates further on applications that specifically iPhone users can download. With obesity rates climbing in the United States, a calorie tracking application is a small step in the fight against this alarming epidemic.
LoseIt! is my favorite, it’s the most user friendly