A Neato App for iPhone Users Wanting to Recover From All the Good Food You've Been Eating

If you like food a lot---and if you don't why are you here?---a nasty side effect often arises, aka more weight than you would like. I've been on a post-grad school loss regimen but had stalled out, for various reasons (moving disrupted my routines, I hurt my back during the move, the holidays...).

I obtained an iPhone 3GS last summer after my old Motorola Q bricked. It took me a bit to "get" apps, but Lose It! has been one of the best. (The other great one is Camera Genius, which adds some truly excellent functionality to the iPhone's sadly underutilized camera.) It's a free calorie monitor, which lets you record what you eat and also how much exercise you get every day.

I did this with a pad of paper before but the benefit of using the iPhone is that I have it with me nearly all the time. Lose It! also does the calculations for you and can be customized to send you (or anyone else) a weekly report, nag you by creating daily appointments to make sure you enter your meals, and so on. It's got a social networking component, too, so you can hook up with online friends, but I'm too much of a curmudgeon for that, I'm afraid.

The big help of Lose It! is the fact that it's really simple for what it does. It's got a decent database of foods and exercises, and doesn't require much data entry on your part. (Of course sometimes you have to guess on a given food.) Given that most of us tend to eat a lot of the same thing, the fact that the app knows what you've eaten before is very helpful because you don't have to search for a food item again.

The controls are straightforward so even someone such as myself, whose tech-IQ is no more than middlin' can master it PDQ. That's good because anything hard to use has this distressing tendency not to get used at all....