Future Alternatives And Competitors

The Lose it! app is great for beginners because of its simple function premise: You just log your food, stay within your calorie budget, incorporate exercise if you desire and eat what you want (so long as you stay within your calorie budget).

It helps with daily calorie goal setting by mapping out your weight loss goals and your desired timeline. To help maintain a low-calorie diet the app offers low-calorie dinner recipes.

Like other apps, Lose it! has the barcode scanner feature to help log foods. The app also has a unique feature for tracking food — using recognition software, the user can take a picture of their food and the app will do the rest.

People commonly start and stop weight loss apps, but social and community support increase the likelihood that users will stick with an app.

WW hosts meetings for users to discuss their weight loss journeys and encourage each other through the process. We love that the community feature of WW can be either virtual or in-person, which is nice to have for tangible accountability.

WW also centers around a proprietary points system that assigns points for food to help users make food choices while boasting that no food is off-limits.

Noom makes it clear that weight management isn’t just about diet and exercise, it’s about the brain and using psychology to “change the way you think and feel about eating.” Noom truly meets you wherever you are on your health journey to create a custom plan and it starts by completing their quiz.

While Noom compares to other paid platforms by tracking food and activity, not limiting types of food and having healthy recipes available, Noom doesn’t charge extra for one-on-one coaching. It aims to uniquely challenge how we approach weight management by coupling psychology with a three-colored “stoplight” system. The stoplight system categorizes food as green (eat more of), yellow (proceed with caution) or red (limit intake). For visual learners, this is a great tool to teach users what foods to eat.

Fooducate is truly a combination of food + education as it goes beyond just calorie counting to expand the user’s understanding of food by grading the quality of it. Much like school, Fooducate assigns an A, B, C, or D scale based on macros, or the nutrients that give you energy (protein, carbs, and fats). Macros play an important role in weight management including signaling to the brain when we are full.

The app also grades food based on other ingredients manufacturers may not want you to notice like high fructose corn syrup and other additives. Additionally, Fooducate also gives a rationale as to why food is graded a certain way and offers alternative choices to further assist in making better choices.

Fooducate is also flexible in how it tracks food as it uses a food point system to assign points instead of calories, as the latter may be triggering for folks with disordered eating. Using the point features helps users meet nutritional goals instead of caloric goals. It’s also great for fine-tuning an individual’s diet, especially for athletes.