Today I have another great guest article on best diet app tips. Please help me welcome Lynette to the blog.
3 Things You’ll Want To Look For In A Diet App
Over the years, I’ve bought many diet books, recipe books and all that stuff but they all have one down fall. You can’t carry your bookcase with you. This means, I would stumble and often fall hard every time we ate out or traveled.
Not anymore, thanks to the smartphone. Even so, it did take me a while to find an app that would work for me. After many trials, I’ll share some thoughts that you’d want to weigh when searching for the app that’s just right.
Diet plans
Some of us need a more structured plan, some don’t and others like to mix it up. The app that you’ll want will ideally have lots of popular plans for you to jump on when you don’t have the energy to work up a plan, create your own when you do and allow you to easily switch from one to another.
The number of diet plans is also important for variety’s sake. I once installed an app that promised recipes following a popular plan. While it had a ton of recipes, I also quickly got bored. Guess what happened to my diet?
A side note on the plans – it should also have a easy access shopping list that you can refer to when you’re out getting groceries.
Ease of setup
Here’s the thing. When we first tell ourselves we want to begin a diet, we’re excited. Raring to go. Nothing kills that enthusiasm like a complicated setup. Apps that require you to answer a million questions and register for an account with yet another set of questions ruin everything.
Granted, the information is used to help tailor a suitable diet and track your progress, but there are better ways to handle that. For example, signing up only if you want to track results or when you want a larger diet plan library. And, if information needs to be collected, it should be easy to enter and kept to a minimum to begin with.
Tracking and accountability
When it comes to diet and fitness, I’d rather not do the social thing, preferring to track progress myself. I know some of my friends would pour themselves into a group. They love interacting in a forum, have accountability partners and share meals and progress on social networks. Nothing wrong with either but having these features is a must. Thankfully, most apps tend to have one or both of them.
The key is how well it is implemented. My favorite app now is DietPoint. The feature I love best is reminders. It is kinda silly that we can forget to eat. Yet, the truth is, we do. Any dieter knows that the key to losing weight is to eat more of the right things, more often throughout the day. Meal reminders which then pops up a meal suggestion is a great accountability tool.
Diets are quite a personal thing. These are certainly not the only things that a good app should have. They are my three most important things.
What do you tend to look for in your diet app?
Lynette Chandler is a modern day mom who loves anything geeky, especially if it helps her run her life and family. Follow Lynette on her blog at https://MomsGadgets.com
Thank so much for sharing your best diet app tips, Lynette. There are so many out there it kind of overwhelms me and then I don’t use any of them. I’ll keep these tips in mind for sure.
Have you tried “MY FITNESS PAL”? It is awesome. It even has a scanner in the app where you scan the barcode of the item you are eating & it enters the scanned item into your diary. How cool is that
Do you know if the weekly menu plan change from week to week, or is it always the original Days 1-5 that shows up when you sign up?