Commenter Ricky asked for my feelings on the Lose It! iPhone application now that I have been using it for a while, so I thought I should post an updated review. If you don't remember, this is the app I am using to track my calorie intake as I work to lose the weight I put back on in 2008.
My earliest observation was the fact that none of the foods I buy seemed to appear in the application's built-in database. This continues to be the case, and those few I do find on the list usually seem to have inaccurate information, or list a different serving size than is on the label. So I have resorted to manually entering everything into the custom foods list. However, the ability to do this is a feature that, as I mentioned before, most of the competing iPhone apps do not offer, and not having this feature is not an option for me. So maybe I'm sacrificing some convenience in the form of more robust food databases, for this one option I can't live without. So be it. Besides, it really isn't all that time consuming to manually enter a food, and it only has to be done once for each food. The time it takes to enter something also depends on what you're tracking, which brings me to my next observation.
In addition to calories, Lose It! does allow you to track other nutrients such as fat, carbs, fiber and protein. These aren't enabled by default, which caused me a bit of confusion at first. What it doesn't do is tell you how much of these you should be consuming. Now, from a pure weight loss standpoint, calories are all that matter. But a diet that is balanced in all of the basic nutrients is going to leave you feeling more satisfied with less potential for cheating out of pure hunger, and it can help you get past those plateaus where you just don't seem to lose anything even though you are staying within your calorie budget. I also felt that the application's calculation of my calorie needs was a bit off. For these two reasons, I do recommend that you create an account on SparkPeople and use it to work out all of your nutritional goals. (Lose It! does allow you to enter an adjustment to its calorie calculation.) Then copy down those nutrient ranges somewhere where you can easily compare them to your totals recorded in Lose It!. I put them in a Note on my iPhone, which is not ideal since you obviously can't see both screens at the same time. I really hope that the ability to calculate, adjust and display nutrient goals will be added to the application itself in the future.
My favorite feature of Lose It! is the Previous Meals button. When you go to add a food to your log, you have the option of browsing back through all of your previous days' meals, and adding an entire meal to the current day at one time. This is great if, like me, you have certain meals consisting of several different items which you eat often - you can add all of these items at once instead of one at a time. Of course, once you have added a previous meal, you can still change the amount of or remove any of the individual items. A perfect example of this is Chris' recent experimentation with a quick and easy chicken parmesan sandwich. The first time he made it, we found that the standard serving of marinara sauce as listed on the label wasn't enough, as the chicken absorbed most of it. So the next time, I was able to recall exactly how much we had used the first time, and then double it with just a few taps. We also used a different bread the second time around, so I simply removed one bread from my log and replaced it with the other.
Lose It! also lets you track your actual weight loss progress, on the Goals tab. Annoyingly, it only allows the starting weight to be entered as a whole number, but subsequent weigh-ins can be entered to one decimal place. (This made it look like I actually gained a fraction of a pound the first week, but I simply hadn't lost anything.) The wording of the weigh-in button suggests that they expect you to weigh yourself every day, but that's actually a bad idea. Your weight can fluctuate from day to day and even hour to hour, so weighing yourself too often can be discouraging if you appear to gain weight from one day to the next. Weekly weigh-ins are what I was taught the first time I started a weight loss program, and that's what I've always done. It gives you a much better picture of your overall progress.
In general, despite its minor annoyances, I'm happy with Lose It! as a way to easily keep track of what I'm eating no matter where I am. I'm not so happy with myself and my willpower these first few weeks, but that is gradually improving. 