It’s Time

It’s that time again. My weight has crept up 8 or 10 pounds, pants tight, back hurts, blood pressure creeping up, probablility of Diabetes increasing. Yes, I know. I should be sensible all the time, but….. I’m not. So it is time to drop 10 pounds and I am turning to technology yet again.

Absolute Fitness App on the Droid

Losing weight or managing your nutritional input is a daunting challenge for anyone. The best method will be different depending on your personality and your lifestyle. One tool I have used is the Absolute Nutrition app for the android operating system. If you love your droid (ok, I admit I do), this can be a convenient method to monitor/modify your nutrition.

This app let’s you plan your weight loss by entering the items you eat and it will record all the nutritional information. It also let’s you record your exercise and account for the calories burned. In the settings, you enter your age, height, etc. I entered low exercise in the settings to get a conservative estimate of calories burned and then exercise only counts when I actually exercise and enter it.

Pros

• Large database of foods that is accessed through the droid internet connection.
• Ability to create custom foods with full nutrition information
• Ability to customize the default serving amount
• Accurate estimation of calories burned by exercise
• Nicely presented statistics of nutritional intake compared to goals that you preset.
• Internet backup of the data

Cons

• Food database leans toward low calorie items and sometimes a bit thin on standard items and on fresh , non manufactured foods. Once in a while you stumble into a complicated list of indistinguishable items, especially with beef and pork products.
• A display with the percent of carbs, protein fat and maybe saturated fat for the day would be a welcome addition.
• It is not free. But I find it a very good value for about $3.

If you want more detailed descriptions and tips on use, continue on to Part 2 of this review

In my previous post Absolute Nutrition App on Android Overview, I spelled out the general idea of the app as well as the pros and cons. In this post I will give a little more details on the various features of the app some tips and tricks to make it more useful to you. Finally, I will explain use of a couple of the trickier features of the Absolute Fitness app.

Using Settings to Lose Weight

The settings page is accessed by the menu button on your phone. If you enter the first eight or so items

Manual Values

like age, weight and gender and target weight, it will calculate things for you. I prefer to manually calculate my base calorie burning by calculating my basic metabolic rate (BMR) using this online tool. (close to come back here). Then I multiply my energy expenditure (BMR) by 1.375 for a very lightly active person. I manually enter that amount (about 2000 calories for me) under the manual daily values item. That way any extra exercise I do is added to the Absolute Nutrition and it subtracts from my net daily calories. Manual entry overrides the calculated values.

If you want to see how I calculate the rest of the manual values , scroll to the table at the bottom of this post.

Now the Stats button on the main page will show your daily values as a percentage of goal. The bar will be green until you get close to your goal, then turn yellow. It will be red if you go over your goal for the day. You can’t see it on this screen shot, but if you scroll down you also see the total daily calorie intake. The calories at the top are calories eaten minus calories exercised.

The most important calculation

The trick is how much below your daily allowance you want to be. In theory, having net claories at 100% of your goal will maintain your weight. I usually shoot for 500 calories less (1500) . 500 daily x 7 days = 3500 calories which is almost enough for a 1 pound/week loss. (need 3900 calorie deficit)