Livestrong

I’m not a health fanatic by any means. I try to eat somewhat healthy, I track my weight like a freak (its the programmer in me) and I work out regularly. May not to the freakish level of some of my co-workers (Example A & B)

One of the recent additions to the iTunes App Store has been a little application called Calorie Tracking from Livestrong.com.

This nice little application will allow you to track your weight, fitness activities and food consumption per day. And it ties back into a livestrong.com account where you have additional tools and fitness information.

First Impressions

Wow! This application is pretty easy to use. The UI is nicely laid out and the food database is pretty extensive. So far, I haven’t found anything that I have eaten that wasn’t in the database. The fitness level activities is a pretty complete database. At least for what I do.

One nice touch in the food database is the applications ability to save recently searched foods before hitting the main server to search for more foods. This speeds up the entry of items that you may have on a regular basis.

Improvements

I only have a few complaints so far with the application. Within the website, you can put certain foods together and save them with a keyword. The issue is, it looks like everyone can save a term and I’m not sure if it is user specific. For example, the breakfast that I put together, didn’t seem to match up when I searched for it. At least, it didn’t expand my OJ and Cheerios into the My Plate appropriately.

Another improvement is that the search occasionally locks up and the app crashes. It seems to recover quickly, but still something that they should be able to hunt down.

Now, they do have a weight goal section:

The one thing that I would like to see is that I am at a certain weight today, but I would like to set a goal of say 185 by 3/1/2009 instead of 1 lbs / week. Its a pretty minor thing, still something I’d like to see.

Conclusion

Overall, its a pretty complete application for those that like to workout, track calories simply and work for a certain goal. For someone like me that has never really tracked thier calories, it makes perfect sense. If you are already doing that with another system, it might not make sense to change. But having a calorie, fitness and graphing database at your fingertips, it is worth checking out. Oh, and did I mention its my favorite price…FREE!

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