Some new iPhone apps purchased…for fatty me

The last week has seen another feeding frenzy in the App Store for me, imagine if you like a whopping great dustbin of “chum” (look it up) hoofed into shark infested waters and that will give you an idea.

WalkMeter – stopping smoking earlier this year came at a terrible cost as the pounds piled up owing to huge amounts of comfort food eating going down the hatch, so to speak. I put on over 2 stone between January 11th, the fateful day, and the start of September. Luckily I’m tall, 6ft 3, so can get away with most of it but nonetheless I really had to make a conscious effort to start shedding some pounds. This app has helped me to date, as has Tap & Track and Weighbot. The latter is just a weight tracking programme where you enter the date and your weight and it shows you a graph but boy, it does it in such a cool way with some great graphics and noises that it makes it all worthwhile. It’s the sort of app that makes using the iPhone such a treat and is the sort of thing Android can only dream of so far.

Tap & Track I purchased after trying out various diet apps. I settled on this one because it is easy to add your own food entries, save them and then use them again whereas on other similar apps it was a right royal pain. These types of apps give a huge downloadable database of foods from the likes of Sainsburys and Waitrose and Asda/Tesco but I found a lot of the calories entries were wrong for some reason. I also like the fact that you can tell the app how much weight you want to lose on a weekly basis, it then tells you (for your personal weight and height) how many calories you can have each day and if you stay below that then you can see how much you have saved on a weekly basis. It makes having the odd treat less stressful if all you are sneaking is a Crunchie (180 cals) and have saved, say, 2000 calories in total for that week. Very useful little app which has helped me lose a stone so far in 5 weeks.

Another nice touch is that you can add in details of any exercise you did. For example, I often walk to work and to and from the hell-hole takes 50 minutes. The app tells me I have then burnt 350 calories which I can “add in” to my daily allowance of calories.

Back to Walkmeter. This is an exercise application for walking, linked to GPS. It tells you have far you have walked, the route taken, how many calories burned and how long you walked for. There are a whole host of other features, you can save routes and times and try to beat them, it stores “walks” in the inbuilt calendar and it shows you, rather nattily, using the Google Maps app (I presume?) the route you took. I only bought it at the weekend but it seems to be working okay….I think it is anyway.