Lose It app: Product Review

More on the food theme - I recently downloaded a free iPod/iPhone app called Lose It. I was looking for an app that would
(1) Track specific nutrients in my intake
(2) Track caloric intake and give me % breakdown of above nutrients
(3) Have a bunch of supermarket foods as well as raw ingredients in its database
(4) Allow me to enter custom foods & their info for home cooked stuff
(5) Allow me to pick "recently used" foods to enter so I don't have to search for "Egoo waffles" everyday.

Lose It meets all of these criteria for food tracking.

So what's going on with me & food? The latest development is that I've decided to give MrM's crazy diet a shot. This means I have to track my daily fat intake like a hawk. I ate like normal yesterday and found that while I seem to be okay on the caloric intake, my fat intake % was 21% while the diet's target is 10%. Oops. The data in the screen shots below is based on yesterday's non-diet intake.

Calorie tracking can get pretty unhealthy & obsessive but I hope I will never reach that point. I got spurred on to do this diet for one main reason - I had another episode of my chronic back problems last Thursday (angry herniated disc). As I result I was in bedrest for almost 3 days, and I haven't worked out in more than a week now. I was worried my butt would be the size of Texas by the time I started working out again, so I decided to read the summary of MrM's book. It is sad that this low fat diet is coinciding with a sudden cake lust that I am experiencing. I specifically want to order myself a tiered wedding cake with icing in fun colors. Something like this one:



Anyway, getting my brain back on track, lets get on with this review. The app breaks your intake into breakfast, lunch, dinner & snacks. For each meal, you can enter something from its database (via search), something you ate the previous day, something from a favorites list, from a recipe you entered, or custom enter what you ate.

In addition to calories, you can set it to track one or more nutrients. Since I'm mainly trying to adjust my fat/carb/protein ratio, that's what I am tracking.
This is a screenshot from yesterday's food log. You can see I had to break my dinner down into its ingredients because rajma was not an option. If I had noticed the recipe feature earlier, I would have entered the recipe to be more accurate. As it stands, I skipped the half tomato & 1/4 onion that I must have consumed with dinner. Also, stuff like the yogurt listed with my dinner is something I entered on my own. The nutrition info for my yogurt didn't match what was in the database, so I created my own yogurt. On the top bar, it shows me my caloric allowance. I don't know how it arrived at my daily budget of 1647, but that isn't important right now.
I took this next screen shot before breakfast, so Friday is all zeros. The weekly average it shows below is pretty much what I ate yesterday since I just started logging yesterday. I need to drop that fat intake by half. Right after I bake and eat my cake.
In addition to all this, the app also allows you to track exercise. As I mentioned, I am currently under repair and will not be doing much by way of exercise unless physical therapy counts.

All in all, I am very pleased with this app. And did I mention it is free?