HOUSTON – It's become easier than ever to eat less, burn more calories wand watch the pounds fall off because there are apps for weight loss at your fingertips.
According to obesity medicine specialist with UT Health Deborah Horn, logging what you eat through apps is a great option for getting and staying trim.
She suggests three types of apps:
Weight Watchers
“In fact, the Weight Watchers app is pretty nice. Patients really like it,” Horn said.
However, Weight Watchers only calculates in points.
MyFitnessPal
If you'd prefer to calculate calories, Horn recommends My Fitness Pal. The bonus with MyFitnessPal is that users can also monitor macronutrients including: cholesterol, iron, sugar, protein and others.
“Typically MyFitnessPal is a great app for logging nutrition. It's got a really broad database, you can search it, if you've used it before you know that it memorizes your meal so it becomes easier and faster every time you use it. It's really only alcohol where I find that it falls down,” she said.
While you may find alcohol suggestions in the database, Horn said it's not registering sugar alcohol correctly.
“Sugar alcohols is what makes up most of the calories in the alcohol that we drink,” Horn said. “So if you look up something like a glass of wine in MyFitnessPal, it will often tell you that it's between five and 10 grams of carbohydrates but really it's closer to 30 or 40 when you count the sugar alcohols.”
Lose It!
Lose it! claims users can take pictures of food and the app can guess the nutrition facts. Although, the camera option doesn't work if the photo is not already in its database.
Horn said the technology is still new.
“Those aren't as commonly used yet but they're coming,” Horn said to anticipate more apps coming with the ability to photograph food.