Lose It! – Meal & Nutrition Tracking

I’ve recently started working on what I eat and have decided to go with a Keto diet. You can learn more about it on Google but it’s basically eating meat and vegetables and not eating sugar and carbs. When doing any kind of diet that tracks calories, carbs, protein or anything else you need, I always recommend Lose It! It’s been around for a long time and I really like it’s huge database of foods. Nearly everything I’ve scanned in is already in the database. Sometime I tweak it a little to my style of measuring but it works so well.

It’s lunch time so I’ll take you through inputting my meal and what information I can see about my day so far. For lunch today I’m having Chicken/Avocado/Quinoa Salad.

We shop at three different stores: Aldi, Target & Hy-vee. We also buy a lot of the store brand items like Archer Farms from Target. If the items aren’t already under the “My Foods” section, then I can just scan them in. I just open the app and go to the “Log” tab at the bottom. It shows today’s date, what today’s budget of calories is based on my body type and desired outcome (weight loss), and placeholders for today’s meals. As you can see, I’ve already eaten breakfast and I didn’t exercise yet today :) (It’s Saturday and we slept in but will work out later, I promise!)

So tapping on the + sign brings up a search feature that automatically loads your most common lunch items. The first thing I’m going to enter is quinoa. If I type it into the search, I get a list of everything including foods I’ve entered or added before, recipes, restaurant foods, etc. I like to always select the “My Foods” section first because it narrows it down the fastest.

Unfortunately, the one under “My Foods” doesn’t match the calories per cup on the package so I must have used a different brand/type last time. I’ll just scan it quick!

It automatically pulls up the screen above on the right with all the nutrition facts. I would always check these if you are on a strict diet. Some are user added and they just leave some things out. In this case, the saturated fat was not entered so I’m going to add it. You just tap on the bar code in the bottom right and you get a nice screen to edit everything. Brand, name, icon, everything. Very nice customization.

After changing the saturated fat I save it and it appears in my list for lunch. After adding all of the items you can see it gives me a total calories for lunch.

Now you can either view just this mean, the entire day or even the week and see your calories or other nutrition information. You can also add simple workout info and automatically track steps to help with the math for calories you’re burning extra that day which will change that day’s budget. There are a lot more features, especially in the premium features, like social, tracking, goals and groups that you can explore but for food tracking, this is the best app I’ve used. Let me know what you’re using!

Download Lost It!