It’s April. Have you ditched your New Year’s Resolution to lose weight? If you did, you’re not the first.
Part of having a successful weight loss journey is being committed, but another essential ingredient of a positive weight control experience is having the essential requirements in order to complete the challenge. With most everyone grabbing food on the go these days, it is important to have a way to track your eating, exercise, and nutrition while you’re out and about.
A popular diet and fitness tracking website, DailyBurn.com, has a free, downloadable app that cohabitates smoothly with their free DailyBurn web accounts to allow you to track your food and exercise no matter where you’re at. You may not always have a computer nearby, but you always have your iPhone, so what better way to make calorie crunching easy and accessible than having it on a device that you will always have with you?
The DailyBurn iPhone app is the perfect extension of their online tracking website. It’s simple, clean interface allows you to quickly and easily track the foods you eat, the miles you run, and the weight you’re losing in the meantime! Pick a personalized training plan from their selection of pre-determined workout programs and get moving, or schedule your own exercise routine to meet your physical needs and calorie goals.
When you first start up the DailyBurn iPhone app, you are quickly asked a few simple questions–age, weight, height–all the essentials to get a good feel for your body, goals, and activity levels. Using this information, the app calculates the average number of calories you should be consuming a day. If you go over this, chances are you are going to see your scale numbers go up instead of down. However, if you stay under the suggested calorie count, you may very well see success! Stay in the range and you’ll easily maintain.
Instead of just being a food journal or just an exercise tracker, the DailyBurn iPhone app does both, along with showing you charts and graphs of your progress over time and giving you the opportunity to create challenges for friends and fitness buddies.
So, you’re thinking, a free app that does all of this?! That’s awesome…right? Well…you know…there’s always a catch…
Yes, you can sign up for an account on their website for free. Yes, you can download the app for free. Yes, you have access to their extensive lists of foods to track for free. If you’re utilizing the basics, you’ll be okay. But to have access to the really cool stuff–like the ability to scan the UPC’s of the foods you are eating to instantly enter in the nutritional values–you’re going to have to pay extra out-of-pocket. In addition, to have access to their full list of training programs or consultations with a trainer, you can expect to pay even more.
If you’re serious about losing weight, tracking your nutritional intake, or taking control of your health through exercise, DailyBurn may be a very decent app for you. Compared to other free apps out there for diet and fitness tracking, you really can’t do much better than the DailyBurn app. However, if you want to take the accessibility and ease of use to the next level, prepare to pay for the appropriate upgrades to help you meet your fitness and nutritional goals.
Sara Haley is an avid writer and self-proclaimed iPhone junkie that writes and reviews apps for Tech on the Go, as well as HappyApping.com.
