Everybody knows that getting fit and, most specifically, losing weight is a rather long and tenuous ordeal that requires more than just wishful thinking. Other than a healthy, well-balanced diet, workout sessions and a drive to not let your dreams be dreams, you will most likely need a guide; a framework if you wish. That is where the best weight loss apps out there can kick in as a helping hand.
Considering that getting a personal coach to handle that is a good idea and will, most of the time, be enough at least for your gym workouts, in order to truly keep everything in check you will need something extra. And that is where the fitness gadgets – and here I mostly mean wearable tech such as the Jawbone or Garmin Fenix – and, to a more affordable extent, fitness applications that one can make use of in their own home.
By using some of the best weight loss apps out there, you are not only giving yourself a very good overview of what and how well you’re doing in your goals, but also gain that extra motivational nudge that gets you up and about.
We’ve been experimenting with some of them and here is our very own list of the best weight loss apps that we could find.
Best Weight Loss Apps #1: Lose It!
Certainly meant in a positive, constructive way, Lose It is a great example of how you can use smartphone or computer applications to the betterment of your life. Most specifically – your healthy, fitness lifestyle-driven life. And the best piece of news about it is that you can get it for free for both iPhones and Android phones.
You can do a wide variety of things with the Lose It weight loss app without hooking any other trackers to it, but most of its native ability relies on an extensive set of information about your diet. For anyone who needs more than just an outlet of numbers to look at regarding calorie intake, Lose It! Is absolutely great as it allows you to set yourself challenges based on an internal scoring system, set weekly limits, and even create and share goals with friends.
Add a helpful tips & tricks section to it as well as reminders and the kind of messages that motivate you to keep at it, and you’ve got yourself a great thing to go on.
Best Weight Loss Apps #2: MyFitnessPal
Compare it to the Lose It application and MyFitnessPal manages to be just as good and even improve on some things that the previous entry wasn’t so good at. The most important thing I can mention in that direction to begin with is the fact that this application is made to work with Windows and BlackBerry phones too, in addition to the classic Android or Apple smartphone.
The MyFitnessPal app has a more “professional” approach to it and doesn’t fare that well on the “do it” kind of attitude. It does, however, offer you a very capable application to handle all of your statistics, diet information and even generate comprehensible graphs and pie charts and whatnot for you.
Similarly to all of the best weight loss apps or fitness tracker applications out there, it lets you connect it to a variety of other trackers that can provide you with a more insightful overview of your progress. You can also visit the www.myfitnesspal.com website for a fully functional dashboard.
Best Weight Loss Apps #3: Pact
While I felt a definite sense of unease at the name of the app, Pact is actually an… odd one to say the least but an innovative idea nonetheless. While one could argue that it employs some form of negative reinforcement, I wouldn’t go that far. Depending on how “motivated” you are to lose weight, as well as how honest to yourself you manage to be, Pact can actually help you out a great amount.
The way it does that is through real life money and not all those mainstream, amateur gamification-inspired point systems that everyone uses. Basically, you will be making pacts that you need to hold – such as promising that you will eat vegetables and fruit and posting a relevant photo that suggests that which needs to get approved by the Pact community. Succeed in fulfilling the pact and you can win real money (up to $5 a week). Fail to do so, and money is taken out of your bank account.
Now there are no fixed amounts for each type of failed task and it gives you the freedom of not only setting the literal price of failure but also whether you’re going to go to the extent of entering your account details to begin with. While it also has some of the regular features one would expect from a fitness tracker such as step count, some degree of calorie burn calculations and the rest, I am unable to focus on that aspect of it altogether.
Best Weight Loss Apps #4: Nike+ Training Club
Thus, we move onto an application that I personally used for a fair amount of time a couple of years ago. The Nike Training Club you can regard as literal fitness coach; one that won’t be able to watch and correct you as you undergo your workouts, but a great guide of how the type of exercise you should be getting for losing weight.
You can use it for more than just losing weight as it has a huge number of workouts and types of workouts for anything you would ever dream of achieving. Things like toning, working particular groups of muscles and so on. Once yous’ve selected your preference, you will get a detailed explanation of what you have to do – particular exercises, number of times you need to repeat it, the amount of time you need to take a break for and so on.
It even allows you to “enroll” in a four-week program that will handle everything you need to do on a daily basis.
Best Weight Loss Apps #5: 7-Minute Workout App
Once again, an application that’s slightly different than the ones we’ve talked about so far, the 7-Minute Workout app is just a distinctively helpful thing to have on your smartphone as it provides the user with a personalized workout they can do in the least amount of time. It’s meant to help you fit working out into your schedule no matter how busy or pressed you are by your day to day life. By following its instructions every day, you’re bound to start seeing results without changing much to your regular lifestyle.
Best Weight Loss Apps #6: Fooducate
Using this application is not even remotely as difficult as it is to pronounce it. Its purpose is not, however, to teach you how to exercise or to motivate you to do your workout. Instead, it just offers a comprehensive translation of everything you can eat by employing the help of a huge database. It’s also heavily reliant on the social aspect of it.
Once you scan the barcode of a product, the app will return an overview of how good that particular item is for you, and providing you with nutritional information such as calories per portion, overall grade as well as a list of better alternatives.
Best Weight Loss Apps #7: Diet Hero
Diet Hero is a great choice for anyone who usually prefers min-maxing their resources and not spending ridiculous amounts of time looking for god knows what special ingredients or rare pieces of exotic herbs and vegetables that will “help you lose weight”. Instead, it tries to help and teach you how to use what you have and what you like to your weight-losing advantage.
By recording into the app what you like eating and what you have at home, Diet Hero will tell you whether it’s a good idea to eat it, when to eat it and in what quantity. After you’ve also typed in your weight and height and all the other necessary details, the Diet Hero app will help you create a personalized diet that you can truthfully start losing weight with.
The downside of the app is that it’s currently only available on the App Store and nowhere else. You will also have to pay a one-time $1.99 fee to purchase it.
Best Weight Loss Apps #8: iPhone’s Health App
Moving onto how you can best use the health applications of your very own smartphone to the best of your interests, let’s start with Apple’s Health. Normally, the default health apps that major operating systems include in their basic programs tend to get overlooked and underestimated. It’s no news that these apps can’t do as much as a professional, dedicated fitness tracker app. But all of our smartphones are equipped with a multitude of sensors that help track a number of things.
If you go and open the iPhone Health app right now, you may be surprised to see a long history of steps taken, walking and running distance as well as flights climbed starting with when you first used the phone. But other than that, you will see a great number of categories of data that lack any kind of entry. Most of them will either require your manual input or information that you normally collect with other fitness and health apps to begin with.
And that is the one aspect where the iPhone Health app can truly shiny. While, by itself, it’s not that amazingly useful if you’re planning to lose weight, using it as your central hub of all things related to your health – including things such as sleeping patterns, vitals, regular medical checkups, nutrition and even reproductive health – can earn you a great overview of which aspects need improving and how well you keep things in check.
Best Weight Loss Apps #9: Google Fit
Android’s Google Fit – while in essence very similar to the iPhone equivalent – has a slightly more capable set of abilities, one could argue. To list the things that are native to default smartphone health apps, and in this case similar to what the iPhone Health app can do too – Google Fit provides you with a great overview of the things it can track by itself. That is: number of steps taken, distance and time walked, run or biked as well. It can draw a variety of charts and graphs that you can use to track your progress over time.
However, the one thing where the Google Fit can turn out to be a little more useful when it comes to the motivational factor – more or less. In comparison to Apple Health, this one allows you to set daily goals such as number of minutes you walk or number of steps you wish to take. After this is said and done, you’ll always be shown the percentage of completion you’ve done every day towards your goal.
However, the one aspect where both the Apple Health and Google Fit ultimately fail is their power as standalones. Logging food is difficult to do and will mostly rely on you knowing exact quantities of sugar, fat and calorie intake because there’s no internal database of foods you can choose from. Connect them to third party apps or a Google fitness tracker, however, and the result is ten times more satisfactory.
Best Weight Loss Apps #10: Xbox One Kinect’s Fitness App
Remember Dance Dance Revolution? It basically employed gaming concepts to make you get some exercise for a change. That is something that was later attempted with the release of things such as Wii or the Xbox Kinect auxiliary devices. While you can try using regular Kinect gaming to get moving, you should also know that there is a dedicated Kinect Fitness app out there too that can make things easier for you.
The Xbox Kinect fitness app doesn’t just show you detailed videos of how to perform each and every exercise in its database, but it also constantly provides you with hints and tips on how to best practice them all. There’s a great amount of reinforcement and a wholly motivational approach to it. The best aspect of it all is the fact that thanks to the Kinect motion detection technology, the application will be able to tell how well you’re performing and doing the exercises while also not giving you a lot of room for slacking off.
