What Apps Make Dieting Easier?

Dieting is not something anyone looks forward to these days. Nowadays, with readily available apps that can pick up your favorite junk foods from anywhere, it comes as no surprise that the apps people are more likely to use are apps for ordering favorite foods and not apps necessarily for dieting. Well, believe it or not, dieting apps do exist—and they can actually work to help you lose weight.

Research from Northwestern Memorial Hospital shows that people can lose weight from dieting apps alone and can also keep that weight off—in the study, the people who used the dieting apps to lose weight kept the weight off for an entire year. If diabetes and potential heart disease can be avoided by keeping your weight in check, then you have nothing to lose when it comes to using a daily dieting app to keep track of your health and manage your weight; especially since it works if you can get yourself to commit to using them.

Looking for some suggestions on where to start when it comes to navigating the world of dieting apps? Well, the apps below are tried and true and have settings that help you diet by using simple tracking methods or incentives such as cash to increase the rewards center in your brain to keep you going strong.

Pact

This app comes for free on both iPhone and android. Not only does this app track your calories, but it also motivates you by giving you cash if you can keep to your weekly goals. However, if you do not you will have to pay a fee, so the accountability is there with this app. To use this app, you will need a PayPal account and to become a member. The idea is that you set up a weekly pact to meet your exercise goals and you verify this by allowing GPS access from the app to verify your login at a gym or to show your motion detector if you only work out from home. I do not think anyone likes to lose money, so this makes this a great motivational dieting app if you getting rewards makes you want to try harder and stay committed.

Lose It!

This app comes for free on both iPhone and android. The essence of this app is a daily food calorie diary, which you do by logging in every piece of food that you eat. The great thing about this app is that it will find the food for you to log in based on your searches—even restaurant menus—and give you every piece on nutritional information about it, thus at the end of the day, notifying you of how many calories you have consumed for the day. The app tells you how much you should be consuming daily to stay at a specific weight or to lose weight. You will see a bar graph showing you how many calories you have left for the rest of the day; search something up to eat with those remainder calories on the app and you will notice how many options (even healthier ones) you can choose from to consume that meet your requirement goals. You can also use their Snap! feature that logs food by a simple photo upload.

My Diet Coach

This app comes for free on both iPhone and android. This app takes a quirky take on dieting and brings the fun of ‘apps’ to how it works. You can create your avatar with this app and earn rewards for it such as clothing along with other virtual rewards for good behavior with your eating patterns. You can also record your body measurements on the avatar for your neck, waist, etc. and add photos too along with inspirational quotes to help you get to your target weight loss. And, if you are ever experiencing a panic moment where you feel you want to eat something but that it will mess up your calorie count for the day, the “panic button” feature, where you can type in what kind of craving you are experiencing, will give you tips on how to avoid the craving.