LoseIt website helps you track calories consumed and burned
When I tweeted that I was on a new weight-loss regime, I got a reply from @JimFenton telling me about @Lose It App. LoseIt is both a free website and an iPhone/iPad/iPod app that helps you track food intake and exercise. I haven’t tried the iPhone version (I have an Android which they don’t currently support) but I am very impressed with the web version.
The site takes a no-nonsense approach to track the calories you consume and burn. It recognizes that 3,500 calories equals a pound of body fat and sticks to the science of weight control rather than relying on fads, points or other techniques that sometimes work but aren’t really necessary if you count calories.
I’m not going to do a comparison with other sites or apps in today’s post (may do that later) but what I like about LoseIt is its simplicity. Type in a food or exersizse and it makes it simple to enter in the amount of food or time and it just logs it for you without undo work on your part. It also has lots of reporting mechanisms and, for those of us who need reinforcement from our friends, it has a social aspect. You can email reports to friends or have the app (or site) send tweets or Facebook status updates with reports on your exercise or changes in weight.
Lose It also works with the Withings Wi-Fi Body Scale to automatically track your weight. I have a scale on-order and will review it after I have a chance to try it out.
Larry Magid is a technology journalist and an Internet safety advocate. He serves as on-air technology analyst for CBS News, is co-director of ConnectSafely.org and founder of SafeKids.com and SafeTeens.com. He also writes columns that appear on CNET News, CBSNews.com, Huffington Post and the San Jose Mercury News.
His technology reports can be heard daily on CBS News and CBS affiliates throughout the U.S. and he has a daily tech segment on KCBS radio in San Francisco. He’s a regular contributor to BBC World Service and an occasional guest on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation. He is often called upon for commentary by CBS television news, CNN and Fox News and has appeared on the CBS Evening News, ABC World News Tonight, the Today Show and CBS Early Show. He has also been a frequent contributor to the New York Times and was, for 18 years, a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
He has written several books including the best-selling Little PC Book and is co-author (with Anne Collier) of MySpace Unraveled.
Larry served on the Obama Administration’s Online Technology Working Group and the Berkman Center’s Internet Safety Technology Task Force.
