Figuring Out Why I’m Fat Vol. 2 - Exploring The Different Meal / Diet / Calorie Management Applications Available

Righty-o!

So I've been having a good weekend, finally being able to see my friends after the coronavirus lockdown - and seeing my Aunt too.

So this blog post is going to be a bit rushed today I'm afraid, but I'm going to smash it out regardless. Eventually I hope to go through all these blog posts and re-invent them into something more concrete, but for now it's just going to have to be a bit rough!

So last week I introduced what I was hoping to do with this project and I said this week I would be looking into the various applications / tools out there to see what is the most suitable for us.

I was really, really hoping to find an open source solution that had everything I needed so that I could use it, promote it and help make it better. However, the options I could find where just not quite there yet, and while of course that's understandable, no one's funding those projects. It did mean that I in the end opted for a freemium /  paid closed-source product. However, long term, I would love to take some of the things I've learned from using these paid solutions and also some things don't seem to exist within the paid apps and put them into action as plugins or extensions to the current open source solutions.

If you're interested in checking those solutions out, take a gander over at Grocy and Wger. Both really cool projects that have a ton of features, but just unfortunately not quite as user friendly or usable as I would like - in order to increase the chances of me actually using them. I'd like to help improve these projects in the future, but right now, to ensure that I actually do what I plan to do, it makes sense to go with a more polished closed source solution.

That closed source solution that I found was LoseIt - a fantastic alternative to the ever popular MyFitnessPal.

There's a few reasons why I chose LoseIt over the alternatives, the main ones that stick out to me right now as I'm writing this (I did apologise earlier that this wouldn't be a particuarly well thought out post!)

• Fully functional Android app (And iOS, I believe)
• Connection to Google Fit (I use YUR.fit to track my virtual reality exercises, and unfortunately YUR only syncs with Google Fit, so I need to use that as an intermediary between the Yur.FIT calorie tracker and the LoseIt app)
• Fully functional website (I often prefer to edit things at a computer where it can be done a lot quicker, even though I use my phone to do most of the tracking. Some stuff, it's just easier to do it on the web!)
• Free Version (Completely free, though lacking some features it seems that there are quite a few decent ones in the free app)
• Free Trial (Hey, I don't mind paying for something if it actually helps, and it's nice to be able to test out an application before I give my money away)
• Reasonably Priced Premium Version ($39.99 per year, while not a small amount of money, it's a lot cheaper than most of the alternatives) + I might not even need it - but if I do, it's something I can stomach paying.
• Excellent Barcode Scanning (Not sure what database they use, but they had so many things on their database that neither MyFitnessPal or OpenFoodFacts had when I tried those out, so that will help a lot with making meal plans quicker)
• Ability to create meals
• Add custom food
• Ability to share recipes, meals etc with other members (I want to share this with my Mum who is going on this journey with me as well!)

Those are the main bits, but yeah, it seems pretty good! I am very much so expecting to be let down on some of these features, as seems to always be the case with cool software, but if most of them can stand up the the expectations, then it should prove to be a very useful piece of software!.

That is my software of choice right now, YUR.fit to track virtual reality exercise and LoseIt to track and plan meals / calorie intake.

I imagine we will along the way add some other cool tools and features to this process, but that's the basics.

I've gone through my cupboards tonight and prepared the ingredients for the dinner I'll be making tomorrow, the app was very easy to use and like I mentioned above, I was very surprised how well it recognized the ingredients I had via the bar code (I don't think I've ever had a full meal get recognized by MyFitnessPal!)

That's all for now - but next week I'll try my best to do a post on the experience of using these applications so there is some more detail!