Team Locals

App Name: Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker by Myfitnesspal.com

Price: Free.

Description: Lose weight with MyFitnessPal, the fastest and easiest to use calorie counter. With the largest food database of any calorie counter (over 1.1 million foods), and amazingly fast food and exercise entry, we’ll help you take those extra pounds off! There is no better diet app – period.

My Thoughts: I rather stupidly decided to try and lose my beer gut before Christmas and downloaded this app in November of last year. Then I thought realistically that Christmas was probably the worst time to start a diet !

I’m not a ‘dieter’ per se, so things like Slimming world or Weight watchers are a little alien to me with their points or sins systems.

Good nutrition is the key to a healthy diet.

This app has helped me monitor whether the foods I’m pushing into my face are good or bad.

You can create a user account with myfitnesspal.com or link with social media. But personally, I haven’t used this function as dieting is personal to me. I appreciate some may want to club together with friends for motivation though.

In setting your user profile for this app you input height, weight and daily calorific goals.

The app is a weight tracker (of course the app can’t weigh you, it’s just a logging device) but most useful of the app is its calorie counter.

Gone are the days of struggling to decipher the nutritional information on a food label, the numbers, the colours. It can be confusing.

It can also be a little misleading if you are trying to follow a particular type of diet.

When I started using this app I noticed that my diet was carbohydrate based. Which most likely explained the bulk I had.

I cut out the nasty beer to rid my gut. (That was hard!)  and adopted a protein oriented diet. With this app I could see my diet evolving and my weight changing.

The app is essentially a barcode scanner with a MASSIVE database of foods. So massive that it is constantly evolving as more users add more data.

No need to read food labels anymore, just scan the barcode of the item you are about to eat, include the portion size and it will give you the nutrition info from that.

You can then at the end of a day or week examine your food intake to see whether you are eating enough Carbs, protein, calories etc.

Watch how your calorific breakdown changes over time and if you remember to weigh yourself and log it in the app, you should hopefully see the results you are looking for.

As a tracking device I give this 8/10

As a weight loss tool 6/10 The only thing that is going to make you lose weight is your own motivation.