Back in March, I happened upon an app in the app store that purported to be a food photo journal. This app was Weight Tracker Pro, and as I said in my review two weeks ago, the actual app ended up being useless. The reason this app caught my eye in the first place, however, was a statement about how just taking pictures of your food can help you become more aware of what you eat, and facilitate weight loss. Even after I realized the particular app was useless, I found other ways to track my food-photos. Some good came of this April nutrition challenge, mostly in the form of discovering the Rise Up app (also reviewed at the link above). Mainly, though, the experiment was a wash.
Here’s the thing. After years and years and years of weight/body/food struggle, I have a really good idea of what I’m eating. Taking photos didn’t help me to be any more aware, and it certainly didn’t help with weight loss. I got more out of the app that helped me to pin emotions to eating than I did with the photos. I was so hoping that a combination of photos and Rise Up would help me to lose – and to be fair, the two along with an increase in exercise did at least keep me level with no gain, which is something. But not enough.
Which means, once again, that I’m back to tracking. I long ago gave up using Sparkpeople for calorie-counting because their counter is very inaccurate and their program is clunky. I’m sick of My Fitness Pal because it feels very judgy, plus it gives you ridiculous low calorie goals to meet. About ten days ago, I started using Lose It. The tracker seems as accurate as MFP but without the judgy-ness. Also, while it has a calorie line instead of a range (I prefer the latter), the excess/under calorie amounts are put toward a weekly average, so that it’s the weekly total that matters more than individual days. Lastly, the daily calorie total is much higher (eg much more reasonable and sustainable over time) than MFP and changes automatically when you weigh in.
I began using Lose It in late April, and my nutrition goal for May is to track my calories at least 75% of the month (23 days). Hopefully the new (and better) way of tracking will keep me motivated to do this long enough for it to actually become a habit (and show results!).
As far as fitness goes, my April challenge was to complete the YWA 30 Days of Yoga challenge from January 2015. I’m almost there, and should finish up this week. Close enough. This month, my only goal is to complete 1500 fitness minutes (I’ve been averaging 1000-1100). Doesn’t matter what kind of fitness, just that I get it done.
The Zen Leaf 
A food photo journal sounds like a good idea, but I don’t think I could keep up with it. I did try the Lose It app you suggested recently, but I uninstalled it after a week! I think I’ve just gotten so used to MFP (and have put so much time into entering all of my stuff, detailing common meals, etc.) that I refuse to start over again. I did like some of the other apps features, though, like the friendly alerts it would send. And how happy/colorful it was. But other simple things, like logging water(!) required you to pay? Blah. I look forward to seeing if Lose It works for you, though. I could still be convinced. I’ve been at a plateau for months, but if I’m being honest, I know I’ve also been too stressed out, losing too much sleep, not being as careful as I should be, fibbing in my tracker, etc. etc. SO. I can’t blame that all on MFP, I guess.
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I think MFP works really smoothly except for one thing – the inability to copy meals from other meal categories. I almost always have leftovers for lunch the next day, and I can’t say “copy yesterday’s dinner” just “copy yesterday’s lunch” so I always ended up flipping when I was having meals to make it easier. Little programming problems like that always bugged me, and my current MFP account is new enough that it has almost no information on meals and stuff in it. I’m basically starting over wherever.
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Lose It was the one I went with a couple of years ago. I liked the weekly leeway as well. It made me feel better about splurge days.
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Exactly! I remember the way Weight Watchers worked back in 2001 and they also had a leeway kind of system, and I like having that again now.
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I hope the new app works for you!
And hopefully the weather will be nicer this month, which will facilitate more activity and easily enable you to meet your exercise goal.
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Thanks! Hopefully I can get past my agoraphobia (which seems to come up whenever I’m stressed and anxious) and actually go outside!
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Something that focuses on weekly intake and not daily? I am checking it out immediately!
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It focuses both on daily and weekly. If you’re under one day and over the next, they kinda cancel each other out, so that you’re over-or-under for the week, rather than the day. I hope that make sense!
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