5 Great Apps to Help You Meet Your Weight Loss Goals

When it comes to technology, it’s everywhere in our everyday lives. And when it comes to losing weight, technology can be one of your best friends. If you’re wondering exactly how, in this article, we’ll look at the ways in which you can use technology for weight loss and the 5 best apps to get that done.

Using Technology for Weight Loss

Technology can be a useful tool to help with weight loss. Fitness trackers, such as Fitbit or Garmin, can help you monitor your physical activity, including steps taken, calories burned, and heart rate. This information helps you set and track fitness goals, and motivates you to stay active.

Food tracking apps are also great. There are many apps available, such as MyFitnessPal or Lose It!, that allows you to track the foods you eat and monitor your calorie intake. These apps can help you make more informed food choices and maintain a calorie deficit for weight loss.

Joining an online support group, such as Weight Watchers or MyFitnessPal Community, can also provide you with a supportive community that shares your weight loss goals. You can share your progress, ask for advice, and get motivation and support from others.

Many personal trainers now offer virtual training sessions, which can help you stay accountable to your fitness goals and receive personalized workout plans tailored to your specific needs.

Stress and emotional eating can be barriers to weight loss. Mindfulness and meditation apps, such as Headspace or Calm, can help you manage stress and develop a healthier relationship with food.

Best Apps for Weight Loss

#1) PlateJoy

PlateJoy is a meal-planning app that’s designed by dietitians. It allows you to set goals like weight loss, and you can even choose from several diets like dairy-free, keto, and paleo. The app also allows you to filter out any ingredients you want to avoid, and offers options to set different portion sizes for each person in your household.

Pros

• Suits any dietary needs
• Customizable portions
• Focuses on healthy cooking and meal planning

Cons

• Requires a subscription to use the app

#2) Noom

Noom is an incredibly popular weight loss app that allows you to lose weight by making sustainable lifestyle choices. The app assigns a daily calorie budget that’s based on a variety of answers to health-related and lifestyle questions. It will factor in everything from your height and weight to sex and goals.

Noom app users can track food intake using a database that includes more than 3.5 million foods. You can also log other important details like exercise, weight, and blood sugar levels.

Pros

• One-on-one coaching
• Focus on behavior modification
• Logging of exercise and food

Cons

• Subscirption gets expensive

#3) Fitbit

Fitbit is one of the best apps for tracking your health on the market. The wearable activity tracker offers a convenient way to keep tabs on your exercise habits and stay motivated.

Fitbit offers a variety of fitness trackers and smartwatches to suit a wide range of budgets, health goals, and style preferences.

In the app, users can view their daily fitness and health data, including:

• step count
• sleep quality
• miles walked
• heart rate

The app also allows you to manually log current stress levels, weight, and food intake.

Pros

• Automatically syncs activities from your wearable device
• Provides detailed data on all activity levels
• Track additional health data like sleep and heart rate
• Connect with friends and compete in challenges

Cons

• You need to purchase the device to access certain data like heart rate and exercise
• There is a subscription required

#4) MyFitnessPal

This popular app integrates calorie counting with tracking micronutrients in the strategy for weight loss. MyFitnessPal calculates your daily calorie needs and allows users to log what they eat throughout the day using a database of over 11 million different foods. This even includes popular restaurant dishes, which may not always be easy to track.

After you enter your food intake for the day, MyFitnessPal provides a breakdown of the nutrients and calories you’ve consumed. You’ll then get a negative or positive balance. The good news is, if you are over your intake for the day, you can always correct it by going for an evening walk or other types of exercise.

The app has several types of reports for viewing health data, including a pie chart that gives a percentage breakdown of each of the 3 macronutrients you’ve consumed:

• fat
• carbohydrate
• Protein

What’s even more impressive, is that MyFitnessPal also has a barcode scanner that comes with the premium subscription. This makes it easier to enter the nutrition information and data of pre-packaged foods.

Pros

• Super easy and quick to log foods
• User-friendly features like the barcode scanner and “Quick Add”
• Syncs with other fitness tracking apps, including Fitbit, Garmin, Jawbone UP, and Strava
• Allows you to input entire recipes

Cons

• User-generated databases may not always be entirely accurate
• Sometimes time-consuming to adjust serving sizes and enter recipes
• Often includes multiple options for one food item, which can be confusing

#5) EatMyWay

EatMyWay takes a unique approach to health and weight loss by going the “anti-diet” route. This type of app is best suited for people who find calorie counting and other approaches interfere with their relationship with food. If you don’t like calorie counting, EatMyWay is your best bet.

The app asks new users important questions designed to help them think about and reflect on how eating different foods makes them feel, with the entire goal being to foster a healthier relationship with food. There are over 60 activities broken down into three pathways:

1. The Emotional Eats Pathway: This pathway reflects on how our emotions affect our eating habits in a non-judgmental way.
2. The Body Feels Pathway: This pathway observes our body image, as well as our physical health overall.
3. The Mindful Shifts Pathway: This pathway asks questions about how we talk to and about ourselves when it comes to our lifestyle habits.

Pros

• Takes an anti-diet approach to health and weight loss
• No tracking is involved, which is beneficial for people that are triggered by tracking
• Shorter sessions are designed to help people reflect without being too time-consuming
• Based on a psychology approach of cognitive therapy and mindfulness

Cons

• Requires a subscription to use the app
• Not available on Android
• Format can be buggy

Summing it Up

Technology can be a useful tool to help support your weight loss efforts. By tracking your physical activity, monitoring your calorie intake, joining online support groups, working with virtual personal trainers, and managing stress with mindfulness and meditation apps, you can increase your chances of success in achieving any type of weight loss goal.

Every app takes a different approach to weight loss and overall health. While some people may feel invigorated by calorie counting, others may feel triggered. It’s important to understand your basic needs before venturing out and downloading any old app. Otherwise, you may encounter technology that is harmful, rather than helpful.

Do your research. Especially if there is a cost involved. Most of these apps offer a free trial, so that may be your first step to a tech-guided weight loss journey.

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