Lose weight. Improve your diet. Increase physical activity. Decrease sugar consumption. Increase calcium consumption. There's a lot to keep track of in cultivating a healthy lifestyle. It takes daily vigilance, a little math, and a lot of record-keeping. But, as the slogan goes, "There's an app for that." In fact, there's more than one app for that, but one of the most popular ones in the U.S. for the iPhone is called Lose It! (free).

While Lose It! is classified in iTunes as a "healthcare and fitness" app, at its core it's a calorie counter and exercise tracker. You use the app to record what you eat in a day, how much exercise you get, as well as your weight. If you choose to set a goal, such as lose a half a pound per week until a certain weight, Lose It! will help you figure out how many calories you should be consuming and burning in order to reach the target weight.

How Lose It! Measures Up

Having tested Lose It! and a few competing apps, notably Calorie Tracker – Livestrong.com ($2.99, 3.5 stars) and Editors' Choice MyFitnessPal (free, 4 stars), Lose It! hit the middle of the road for me. The reason that app isn't stellar is it has a disappointing food database, which lacks entries for dozens of items that I (and surely other people) actually eat. Lose It! does offer users the ability to create a custom food in the database, so you can add anything that's not there, but it takes a long time to do. When it comes to fitness management, I found the apps that worked best get you in and out of the data-entry process as quickly as possible. I don't want to have to look up and enter nutritional information every time I eat something. What I do want is to seamless integrate a calorie and exercise tracker into my busy life.

Exercise Log

The exercise logging section of Lose It! is fairly standard. Options for activities are fairly comprehensive (including sexual activity!) and include all the basics, such as a variety of sports and all the cardio equipment you'd find in a gym. Record having done an activity, and you'll enter the amount of time spent doing it, as well as the intensity level when required (as "passive, light, kissing" burns fewer calories per hour than "active, vigorous" sexual activity).

Again, this activity section is fairly standard and doesn't do anything significantly different than most other calorie-counting apps. If you integrate Lose It! with Fitbit (3.5 stars), an online fitness tracker that comes with a smart pedometer ($99.95), Lose It! can more accurately offset your net calories for the day based on how much you've walked, run, and climbed (stairs).

Food Database

Like all the other apps in its class, Lose It! for iPhone also has a full Web portal where users can log the same information they keep on their smartphones, as well as manage a few other things regarding your profile, goals, and so forth. As much as the website may come in handy for some—especially if you're going to enter custom foods to the database—the app offers a much more realistic way to track calories, because you theoretically always have your phone with you. The number of foods most people eat in a day can get out of hand quickly, so the best way to keep on top of logging is to do it several times a day. That's why apps are the best medium for this job.

Lose It! for iPhone does indeed help you log your calories burned and consumed while you're on the go, but not easily as it could. The biggest disappointment, as I mentioned, was Lose It!'s middling database of foods. Search for any common American food, such as bread or milk, and the app delivers dozens and dozens of results, perhaps too many, leaving you searching for the best match. Name-brand package foods abound. If you tend to eat packaged foods most of the time, you're better off with an app that has a built-in bar code scanner, like MyFitnessPal. Lose It! doesn't have one.

Lose It! didn't have a lot of foods and drinks that I, as an avid home cook and eclectic restaurant goer, actually consume. For example, one day I slurped down a delicious sugary drink made of sweet red beans that was somewhat similar to bubble tea (also called tapioca pearl tea), except it had red beans instead of tapioca pearls. No food database would reasonably have that exact item, but I was hoping to find some kind of bubble tea and call it close enough. Search as I might on Lose It!, I couldn't find anything remotely close, not bubble tea, not tapioca tea, not pearl tea—nada. I could have created my own entry for the food had the time to research the nutritional information of bubble tea, but it seemed like a pointless effort. Why would I go through all that trouble for a drink I would likely never record having consumed again in my life? And yet, for the app to really help you, you’ve got to tell it everything.

Search Results

Out of curiosity, I looked on two other apps, MyFitnessPal and Calorie Counter by Livestrong.com, and found several results for both tapioca pearl tea and bubble tea, in a variety of flavors and sizes. With Lose It!, I gave up. The same thing happened when I made a Korean dish called ddeok-boggi. It has a few alternate spellings in English, but despite any language barriers, I found it in both Calorie Counter and MyFitnessPal, but not in Lose It!

Another problem is that there's no auto spellcheck, so if you type in more information to try and narrow down the results… the more you type, the greater the chance you've introduced a typo. One typo can kill the whole search. It's a nuisance, and when you're already cranky from trying to reform your diet, you really can't make enemies with the app that's supposed to be helping you.

Livestrong's app, Calorie Tracker, is on par with Lose It! although each does something better and worse than the other, and neither are great. MyFitnessPal, however, is a wonderful app with an ever-expanding food database—the most comprehensive by far, and still our Editors’ Choice for iPhone fitness apps.

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