LoseIt iPhone Application Review

Being a fitness nerd I’m always trying new fitness gadgets and applications. I’m not looking for a magic bullet or anything, just tools to make my fitness journey a bit easier or maybe even more fun. I’ve found throughout the years that the more information I have about why I’m succeeding or failing the better I do. I’m not talking about paralyses of analysis, I’m instead just talking about timely information with a decent amount of depth.

One of the most instrumental and detailed applications I’ve used on the iPhone and iPod Touch that has helped me a ton in the past 16 months has been LoseIt. It’s currently available free on the iTunes AppStore and also has a website component. Yes, free as in me wearing my old size 56 pants free. Sorry, bad imagery there.

Just to get it out of the way, I was neither compensated nor asked to do this review by anyone. I am doing it purely because I love this application and have found it hugely helpful to lose almost 100 pounds (only about 2 pounds to go). Besides it’s free so if you don’t believe me it costs you nothing to check it out and see for yourself.

This review is quite long and thorough. If you looking for a small writeup, this isn’t it. If you want an idea of all of the features available and whether I find them useful then this is your place. Sit back with a snack and read on if your interested in learning about LoseIt.

Setup & Goals

I haven’t relaunched the application from scratch in a very long time. I’m going to tell you what I remember of my first setup experience. I remember it as being fast and to the point. It asked about your goals, gender, height, and other information like email (optional but used for backup and other things). In the end you get asked questions to fill in your program information that you see in the screenshot on the right.

You can go back at any time and change your information which is nice. Their stock goals range from maintaining to losing 2 pounds per week in half pound increments. As you choose your goal you get a visual indication in the form of a date that tells you how long it will take you to reach this goal. This is very convenient and helpful because it reinforces immediately that it’s not a race and that you need to know practically how long this is going to take.

If your a glutton for punishment and want to lose more weight, or maybe you want to gain weight, you can further customize your journey by adding or subtracting more calories from their recommendation. Personally I setup my LoseIt to lose 3 pounds per week by selecting 2 pounds from their standard view and customizing it to remove an additional 500 calories per day (remember 3500 calories are in a pound). I only yesterday removed those 500 calories because I was having trouble hitting it and I’ve already lost almost 100 pounds using LoseIt.

Your Day At A Glance

This is the first screen you usually see when launching the application. It gives you a rundown of your budget, calories consumed, calories burned, and net calories remaining for the day. As you can see my day was pretty solid on Wednesday as I burned a ton of calories exercising (circuit training and a long evening walk) and even after eating I was still 700+ calories in the green.

You can quickly change into the week view by selecting it from the segmented control on the top. You are then presented with a nice overview of how your doing for the week with a prominent budget bar so you can visually see where your targeting. You also see a summary for the previous 4 weeks with indicators showing if you were above or below your weekly totals.

My one complaint about this view is that you can’t control anywhere in the application what day of the week you start on. Personally I’d choose the day after my weigh-in day. For them it’s always Monday which seems odd to me. It would also be nice to quickly touch the week indicators to jump to that week instead of having to use the arrow buttons, but that’s a nitpick.

The final view on your day at a glance is your nutrients. This is where you get to see the meat and potatoes of your program and how far you are off your nutrient goals. I wasn’t to far off on the day in the screenshot since I shoot for a 33/33/33 split for my Fat, Carbs, and Protein. You can see for the week overall I was a bit closer than on this day in particular.

One thing I’d like to see made available are goals for nutrients. Whether those goals are percentages or total grams I’d like to set my goals and see visually where I am in relation to them. Again, I know where I want to be so it’s a nice to have.

Entering Foods

Lets talk a bit about entering foods into LoseIt. This is where the application shines but also has some work to make it easier. As you can see from this shot I’ve entered all of my food for the day. Along the top you see your budgeted calories, calories from food, calories burned from exercise, your net calories (budgeted – food + exercise), and finally how far your under (or over) your calories for the day.

This is where people get confused, especially if they don’t see calories burned from exercise as increasing the calories they can eat. I think it would behoove LoseIt to make this configurable to let the user decide how they want it displayed. In the end I try to make sure my food calories are less than my budget but at the same time if I burned a ton of calories exercising I make sure I’m overall just under.

You can add food from your day at a glance view or from the Log view. From here it takes a minimum of 4 touches to enter an item, which is best case and assuming you don’t have to search. It’s kind of annoying having to touch so much but you get used to the workflow and get fairly proficient at it. I really wish the developers would learn something from the Groceries app how to optimize entering many items at the same time.

As you can see you can select what meal your adding the food to and what source of foods you want to choose from. The built in database of foods is available offline which is nice and convenient when your out and about. It also has quite a bit of depth to it, just don’t expect any regional or local odd foods within the app, you have to enter those yourself.

I find that I select from my previous meals quite a bit, especially since I repeat the same breakfasts and lunches. There are a few weeks of previous meals available in this list.

One cool feature in the foods that you might not notice at first is that there are literally hundreds if not thousands of unique icons for the foods. I swear the icon designer was either bored or very dedicated because I’m always surprised at how many unique fruits, veggies, meats, drinks, nuts, etc have icons. Kudos to them for this attention to detail, it really adds to the user experience.

That actually reminds me of another annoyance (aka feature request) I have for LoseIt. I don’t just eat Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and Snack. I eat 6 meals per day and hate that I have to group all even numbered meals into snacks. Please please let me specify the number and name of my meals. This would be the biggest feature ever for me.

Finally actually searching for food … It’s pretty much self explanatory. You type what you want and it searches for it. If your in the My Foods section it’s an active search that adds and reduces as you type but if your typing in the Search Foods section it doesn’t search until your done.

As you can see the search results from the Search Foods section is segmented based on where the food is from. There are categories like None (for foods you have at home), Supermarket Foods, and Restaurant Foods. The databases for the supermarket and restaurant foods is quite nice and pretty accurate. I have however seen discrepancies in calories and other nutrition data but to be honest a few here and there isn’t a biggie, it’s not an exact science it’s just an estimate. Besides all companies reformulate and tweak serving sizes etc so I don’t expect perfection here. I would however like the ability to edit existing food entries from their database or at least clone them but they don’t yet have this feature.

Entering Exercise

Adding exercises is just as simple as adding food. You can quickly choose from your previous exercises that it remembers as you do them or choose from a huge list with bazillions of exercises like archery, broom ball, hunting, kickball, table tennis, yard work and everything (literally) in between. Most of the exercises have you enter a distance and/or duration and some even require that you select an intensity level.

If you can’t find an exercise that’s no problem, create your own by giving it a name, duration, and number of calories burned. You can then reuse it in the future and it will attempt to calculate your calories based on the time you choose next time. Nothing fancy but it certainly works well.

Friends

This is one of the newest features for LoseIt, the ability to add friends and watch & support each other along your journey. You can quickly and easily add a friend if you have their email and they have LoseIt. Obviously they have to approve you as a friend (within the app) but once that technicality is out of the way you can view each others weekly progress, weight loss to date, date they’ll hit their goal, calories per day, exercise totals for the week, recent activities or their recent indiscretions.

There is a fun little breakdown view that shows all of your friends recent activities kinda sorted by time. You can quickly tap the envelope icon to send them an email of support or to reprimand them for that calorie overage yesterday.

I really do like this friend feature within the application. It’s added a whole new dimension to losing weight that often times you only get through a full website (which they have as well). About the only thing I’d like to see is the ability, just like in my personal day glance, to view the last 4 weeks worth of my friends data. I currently can only see their active week and as soon as it rolls into Monday I can no longer see last weeks info which is kinda lame,

Goals

You can flip over to goals to see a nice chart or where you started and where you are currently at in relationship to your goal. As you can see from mine I had my dip and then rise at the end of last year followed by a great year this year. It offers a clean view of your goal weight, plan summary, calorie budget and controls to quickly edit your plan (see edit screenshot up top) or to record your weight today.

You unfortunately can’t do anything with the graph … no zooming, no landscape or week/month/year view (like WeightBot) … no nothing. Yawn … seems like a few things you’d like to do here but nada.

More

There are a number of other features hidden in the more section. You can quickly edit any of your custom food or exercises, turn on or off certain nutrient tracking, enable/disable a password lock, or configure motivators. There’s a lot hidden in here … including something nice but weirdly implemented … motivators.

As the name implies it’s a feature that you use to motivate yourself to use LoseIt. Essentially you choose it and it quickly kicks you out of LoseIt into Safari (can we say in app browser). You are then presented with the ability to turn on/off:

• Emailed reports — these are summaries of your usage including workouts, food, etc from LoseIt (see above screenshot of email). You also get a spreadsheet (here’s a sample) with intimate details of everything you ate and every exercise … pretty nice ahe?
• Twitter — sharing of your progress and exercises via Twitter. I don’t use this feature since I already have enough spam in my twitter log so I figure my friends don’t need to see this.
• Facebook — the same as the Twitter feature just on Facebook.
• Reminders — for me the best motivator. You can enale push notification reminders to your phone (at configurable times) to remind you to enter your Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner information. This feature has saved me on more than one occasion from forgetting to enter information. I think their defaults are way to tight in terms of time so I’ve bumped mine to give some slack time to enter.

Last But Not Least, A Website

I don’t have any more room in this entry to post about the website with the screenshots and the whole 9′s. It a newish website that’s directly tied into the application on your device. You can run more reports including graphs of your data, edit your motivator settings, view friends data, and participate in their online forums.

The site and forums are pretty active considering it’s just users of the application (and some lurkers). This is because you cannot edit nor enter any food or exercise information on the site. When it comes to your LoseIt data it is a purely read only site except for the forums.

I’m hoping the decision to not allow use of the site to enter information was a short term technology decision to get the release out sooner and not a long term approach to LoseIt. If not then I think they need to make every single feature of the site available from within the application, otherwise your confusing your audience and actually doing them a disservice. If your asking the user to constantly change their mode of interaction from application to web browser and back again your breaking the interaction paradigm and not only making it hard to get anything done but your losing mind share.

My other complaint about the site is their authentication always seems to be flakey. No, it doesn’t fail but I constantly have to relogin despite having just been on the site seconds before. This again makes me not want to use it despite some great people on the forums. I’ve noticed it mostly seems to happen when I enter into the site from their root domain and not the subsections.

In Conclusion

The LoseIt Application is a very easy and dare I say fun to use application for entering your nutrition and exercise information on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s attention to detail and solid performance (hasn’t crashed in 16 months for me) make this application a must try for anyone owning an iPhone. There are of course a few things that could be done to make this application even better but the same can be said for all software. I’m certain the LoseIt developers have plenty in store for their millions of users (I don’t have any inside details).

Go check it out and let me know what you think.

• The Unofficial Guide To Lose It Badges
• Friday Fitness Update On The Record
• My Resolutions For 2012
• A Quick Retrospective On 2011
• How I Fuel My Weight-Loss