We have many diets in this country. So many, in fact, we have to borrow names from other countries: The Mediterranean Diet, The Okinawa Diet, French Women Don’t Get Fat, and so forth. In a country of obesity escalating at such alarming rates as to be inappropriately deemed “an epidemic,” physicians and nutritionists have been constantly publishing new medical studies, discovering the latest en vogue nutrient, and concocting the latest and greatest diet. However, through all of this food and exercise confusion, this medley bedlam of what and how to eat, one rule has really stood the test of time: burn off more calories than you take in to lose weight. It’s a fairly simple equation and yet so many people desiring a healthier weight fail to accomplish such.

According to an article by WebMd that quotes a study by the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, a food journal can help people from slipping on their diets by keeping a daily record of their caloric intakes. While excellent in theory, in reality most people, for one reason or another, choose not to make the time to jot down a few simple meals and snacks and approximate their calorie intake. It is, after all, not very convenient for those of us who seek a quick fix with the latest diet or doctor prescription.

Here is where Lose It! by FitNow, Inc. comes to the rescue. The program basically thinks and compiles everything for you, like a personal nutritionist. And best of all, it’s completely free to download. After entering your height and weight, you choose your goal weight based on how many pounds a week you wish to lose (the program allows a maximum of 2 pounds lost per week). Based on your activity level, Lose It! calculates what your average caloric intake and expenditure would be, and then recommends a daily caloric budget to lose weight.

To start the program, you simply select foods from a stored compendium of hundreds of food choices – which includes not only common supermarket brands, but health market brands like Nature’s Choice, Newman’s Own and even, to my utter delight, Ezekial 4:9 – into your daily choices of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. If for some reason you don’t find a food choice that closely matches what you ate, you can simply customize one yourself. To make this feature even greater, you can even change the serving size, depending on the food at hand, to classifications like “slice” to the more succinct cup or tablespoon measurements. The same goes for exercise: you may search a database of hundreds of exercises or you may customize one yourself, and any exercise is deducted from your total calories. The program then charts all this according to daily, weekly, and monthly records, and then totals your net weight or gain at the end of the week. It also stores any regularly used food choices you enter, and saves any recipes you decide to jot down.

What doesn’t Lose It! do? Frankly, I was hard-pressed to find anything critical to say about the app. Obviously, Lose It! is not a replacement for sound nutritional advice, nor should it be used as a fail-proof way of calculating exactly how many pounds you will lose. The human body and the food it ingests are very complex and unpredictable elements, and there may never be a hand held device that accurately measures what you put into your body. But as long as we have Lose It! on our side, at least we can better manage what we put in our mouths before we order that scrumptious cheesecake for dessert.

5 out of 5 stars