There are many free applets available that will help improve the experience of using your phone, as well as keep you entertained, keep track of things, and make it easier to find information. There are also applets that are also for pure entertainment purposes. The best applet I’ve found to help you track your calorie intake and physical activity is the Livestrong applet. The Livestrong applet is designed to work with the livestrong.com online fitness community owned by Lance Armstrong.
To get started with this applet, you’ll need to purchase it for your iPhone, Blackberry, or Android. The applet costs about $3.00. Once you have purchased and downloaded the applet, you will need to sign up for a livestrong.com account, which is free.
You can then start the applet and it will ask for your username and password. After entering this information, you will proceed to enter your setup information. Setting information includes your age, starting height and weight, and daily activity level. You will then go into what your fitness goals are; either to gain weight or lose 1-2 pounds per week. I recommend that if you are looking to lose at least 2 kilos each week, you enter your daily activity as sedentary. By doing this, you will ensure that the applet gives you the lowest calorie count available to enable you to lose weight in a healthy way. If you enter your daily activity level as something higher, the applet will insist that you need to eat more calories and this usually ends up giving you too many calories per day, slowing down your weight loss.
Once you’ve entered all the settings, you’re ready to start tracking your physical activities for the day and, more importantly, tracking your food intake.
No matter what physical activities you enter, the calories burned from your training session are added to your calories to consume for the day. So, if you start with a base level of 1,400 calories per day, but then do a 30-minute workout that burns 200 calories, then your calorie intake for the day will increase by 200 calories. So now you’ll have an extra 200 calories to consume for the day.
Keeping track of calories consumed is easy with the Livestrong applet. You can enter any food and see if it is in the database. There are over 600,000 foods in the database with more being added daily. The foods in the database range from general foods like a banana to very specific foods like “Trader Joe’s Cilantro Dressing.” I was even surprised to find many chain restaurant items in the database. Once you locate the food you want to enter, you will be asked how many servings of that food were eaten and at what time. Once you enter and save food to your tracker, the main page of your applet will show how many calories you have left for the day and you will start to see a yellow bar graph from 0 calories for the day to your diary. count.
