Keeping Track with Lose It

I went into this whole weight loss thing with no intention of counting calories. I know that it works, I have been very successful in the past by simply keeping track of my food. But it is SO MUCH WORK. Seriously. It's hard enough planning meals for my brood without figuring out what each and every thing I put in my mouth's caloric count is. I'm all about the convenience, don't you remember?? But convenience, laziness, lack of discipline all led me to this place to begin with. And certainly my sense of what an appropriate portion size is or what the smarter choice is when given several options has become very skewed. Being made to face exactly what I am consuming and how that measures up to what I am supposed to be consuming seemed like an important step to me.

In the sake of maintaining some sense of convenience, I found an app to help me track what I'm eating and stay within a calorie guideline. I found it on my Kindle in the app store and it is called Lose It. You can also access it HERE on the web. It's simple to get started - you sign up and enter your gender and weight along with your goal weight and how much you want to lose a week to get there. It then gives you an estimated date for reaching your goal and tells you how many calories you need to consume a day to get there. This adjusts over time as you lose weight. Each day you log your meals (there is a very extensive food log to choose from that includes grocery store items as well as popular restaurant items and an option to enter your own recipes) and it keeps track of your running total throughout the day. I love that it stores your entries so that you can easily find your regular food items and enter them into a new day without any extra searching. I can't tell you how much this kept me on track the past few days and aligned my thoughts on what I'm consuming with the reality of what is really going into my body.

Just to be clear, I am not being compensated in anyway to talk about this site. It is a completely free app/website. I just know that one of the best ways to discover something new and useful is to hear it from someone who has experienced and enjoyed it. I want to share every step of this journey so that you can see what is working and what is not working for me and take from that what might help in your journey.

Do you use any apps to help keep you accountable in your weight loss journey?