~ iPhone Apps! ~

Thought I do a couple of reviews on the apps on iPhone. I'm always on the lookout for useful ones that help me in my daily routine. Now, while browsing thru' the Apps store, found one that calculated calories. Oh man, that is one useful app that I use literally every day, in fact, every hour as I'm constantly checking how much calories a particular food has!

It's called My Fitness Pal, a calorie counter and dietary tracker app. When you first use it, it asks you for the usual info such as weight, height and how much weight you wanna lose/gain/maintain and then it calculates your calorie intake per day. Once done, all you do is itemise what you eat per day and it will inform you how much calorie you're consuming. Since using it, I've been made very aware of calories found in food. Suddenly I'm showing a lot of restrain in consuming food with high calorie as that will very quickly hit my quota per day. I'm on a mission to lose at least 2 kg before I go home for the summer hols. Hence, I've got a calorie quota of 1200 per day. As I've only started this week, it has been hard to try and keep to the quota and I'm usually overshot by an average of 100 calories. I'm quite impressed by the food list as my diet is mainly Chinese cuisine and it does show food that comes from my country as well! It's scary sometime to see how much calories I consumed per meal! Here's a couple of snapshots of the app.

Here's a daily entry. When you click on Add, it will bring out a list of what categories (Breakfast, Lunch... Strength (for exercises) and Water). Simply choose which category and then key in the food. It brings out a list and you choose what sort of food it is (hey, it will even list all the Walkers crisps!) It's dead simple to use and very informative.

  

Here it shows you how many calories a homemade curry has, based on serving size (which can be altered). 

All I can say is I'm more aware of the labels on food now when I shop! Never bothered before but now, very highly aware! Oh did I say that the app is FREE too! And you can also do it online too if you don't own an iPhone... check out the website: www.myfitnesspal.com. What I like about it is that I don't have to stick to a diet plan and I can still eat what I like but ensuring that I stick to my calorie quota. I love nothing more than to check out the calories of food especially of chocolates! My MIL just gave me a box of M&S chocolate-coated ginger biscuits (my fav) and when I checked the calorie per biscuit, it was 100! (yup, I found it in the food list including the brand too!) All I can say, it's not easy eating just 1 biscuit!!!

The next useful app I found is one that track your menstrual cycle called Period Tracker. Another useful app as it calculate your cycle, let you know when is your fertile moments as well as your ovulation date. Very useful if you either wanna try for a kid or avoid getting pregnant! (for moi, the latter!) There are a few apps for this but I chose this particular one as it was the highest in popularity and it's FREE again! 

No wonder I'm not scrapping... constantly on the lookout for new apps! :) TTFN!