Want to lose the “Covid 19”pounds you’ve gained during the past year in quarantine? You’re not alone. While comfort foods may have increased in your diet during 2020, the new year is a time to resurrect your healthy meals plan and shed some of those gained pounds. With Spring on the horizon, it will soon be time to go back outside and enjoy time in the fresh air with friends and family. If you start now, you will look and feel your best this year.
Here are 5 weight loss apps that can help technology work for you in your quest to revamp your diet this year:
The Keto Diet, which helps you achieve weight loss goals by lowering your carb intake so that your body enters “ketosis” where it burns fat for fuel, is a popular way to lose weight. The Carb Manager Keto Diet app is a smart way to adopt the Keto lifestyle and will help you stay on track with this new way of eating.
The app teaches you the basics of the Keto diet, provides you with a personalized meal plan, helps you decide which fats are right for you, and warns against the 8 most common Keto diet mistakes. Whether you’re new to Keto or a seasoned low-carb pro, this app can help you with its food diary, keto calculator and advanced food tracker. More than 3 million users have already proven this app works. Are you ready to join them in a low-carb lifestyle?
Cost: Free. Paid premium functionality available.
Maybe it’s liquid calories that are derailing your diet goals – specifically, alcoholic liquid calories and the cravings and poor food choices that can come with them. If you’re looking for a savvy way to track and lower your alcoholic intake, Drinkaware is an excellent choice.
The app features tools and trackers to help you monitor your alcohol consumption. This includes a self-assessment tool to review your current alcoholic beverage intake to become aware of how much you consume and your patterns for consuming it. It can even track the amount of money you spend on alcoholic beverages for an added motivation to cut back!
Cost: Free.
The Complete 5:2 Diet
Want to try something revolutionary to shake up your diet this year? The Complete 5:2 Diet app from Lifesum takes a new approach: Eat what you want for five of the seven days each week, consuming up to 2,500 calories for men and 2,000 for women. However, on the other two days, use the philosophy of intermittent fasting and consume a scant 600 calories (men) and 500 calories (women).
The 5:2 Diet app provides you with four weeks of recipes (over 140 recipes you can try) and suggested exercises. The app helps track both your caloric intake and workouts. It also features a calorie counter to help make sure you’re staying within the recommended range.
Cost: $1.99
Why not join the millions of people who have lost weight with Weight Watchers – especially now that they’ve revamped their app and offering? Instead of counting calories, WW uses a SmartPoint system to help you make better food choices that lead to weight loss. The app itself is free, but in order to use it fully, you will need a subscription that starts at $3.22 per week after an initial free month.
With the subscription, you’ll be able to track your food intake, activity and weight, plus get full support from a Weight Watchers’ coach through the app’s 24/7 chat function. That could be handy to thwart midnight cravings!
With more than 9,000 healthy recipes, meal-planning tools, on-demand workouts and community support, this app has everything necessary to help you lose weight and support your decision to improve your health.
Cost: Free, but requires a subscription for full utilization.
One problem dieters face is that our meals combine different foods that aren’t necessarily easy to track in caloric consumption. If you have trouble with assessing your calorie intake, the MyFitnessPal app may provide the solution. With millions of foods in its extensive food database, it’s a free resource to help you count calories.
It works like this: during setup, you’ll enter basic information, including your age, height and weight, plus your goal weight. The app will create a custom plan tailored to you, including a calorie goal you can work toward achieving. It tracks your food and water intake, plus your exercise output. You can see how your exercise calories impact the number of food calories you have each day, making it easy to keep track of both your caloric intake and output.
Pro tip: MyFitnessPal can also help you achieve the calorie intake for the 5:2 Diet (but free of charge).
Cost: Free. Paid premium offering available.