Every year people go crazy trying to lose weight before summer, and bathing suit season. People buy all sorts of exercise equipment, join health clubs, gyms, and start cutting calories.
This year I waited until June. The middle of June to be truthful, and then I went “whoops!” So I knew I needed to try something different.
Now, I am not one to exercise and I freely admit that. So my alternative to lose weight is what I put in my mouth. This year I decided to try counting carbs. Guess what? It works! It’s one reason I ended up here on the Traveling Low Carb website, and I see you did too.
If you’re counting carbs like me you know you have to have an easy way to know how many net carbs are in each type of food you eat during your day. I found the easiest for me would be to use an app. Since I own an iPad and iPhone I opted to download apps to test that I could use on either.
If there were two I grabbed the one that would work on both and left the iPad app sitting in the App Store. That’s just because while I have my iPad around a lot I know I always have my iPhone when I am not at home, especially in a restaurant, and I think that’s pretty true of most people.
I started looking when an app called iCarbs caught my eye. But as soon as we got it into our website’s testing phase we weren’t sure if they were reporting full or net carbs in the app. A quick email exchange revealed that the developer really didn’t know, which is never good. So we asked Lynn. I told her that he had said that he was putting in the raw info from the USDA site and Lynn verified for us that then they were not net carbs, since they weren’t balanced out with the fiber grams. Since the app didn’t give us a way of determining that, coupled with the fact that they developed the app from information they clearly didn’t understand themselves, we decided to pass on further testing and would suggest you do the same.
So we started looking at apps that really would be good for those of us counting carbs to lose weight. We went through a lot of them and settled on five more to tell you about.
Starting off you’ll find an app that probably comes immediately to mind; the Atkins’ Diet app. It is a free app that will give you some information but we quickly learned that it, understandably, leans toward giving you information about the foods they sell. Now if you purchase it yourself you are probably going to like their app. However if you are eating their food I question whether you need it. We do like that they give you the carbs in a cheeseburger at the fast food restaurants without adding in the bun. Most apps lump them together and then you have to try to figure out how to back that out.
Atkins Carb Counter Features:
- Create your food and weight loss diary on the move
- View your History, see how the food you eat affects your weight
- Set and monitor your targets
- Easy to use food entry
- Create your own custom foods
- Tips, messages and motivation from the Atkins team
Let’s take a look at Daily Carb. This is another simple app but they start to add in items like how much water you are drinking and it will allow you to put in your own recipes. Another item that this one has is exercises for those inclined. It also gives you a journal where you can keep track of those activities.
Daily Carb Premium Features:
- Create your carb budget and track it
- Track your food logs includes daily nutrition intake, such as carbs, fiber, calories etc
- Huge default food database from restaurant, common foods and supermarket
- Add your custom food or your recipes
- Add food to Favorites
- Search food database
- Report your carbs intake
- Hundreds of default common exercises for you to chose
- Customize and save your own exercises
- Track your weight logs
- Log your daily quantity of water intake
- Create unlimited reminders
- Calendar overview of your data
- Password protection so no one can see how much you weigh
- WiFi Backup & Restore
- Determine how many calories you need to achieve your weight goal
- Low Carbohydrate meal plan based upon your caloric needs
- Each heart healthy balanced meal plan has 3 meals and up to three snacks on each day
- Low Carbohydrate recipes
- The app provides a shopping list making it easy to purchase everything you need
- Track your weight over time
Moving on to a very well put together app, The Belly Fat Cure™ Sugar and Carb Counter is a great app made by a company, Oceanhouse Media, that is known for keeping up and maintaining their apps. This quality app is based on the New York Times bestseller, “The Belly Fat Cure” by Jorge Cruise, who personally struggled with weight as a child and young man, and knows what you are going through and wants to guide your through your experience.
This app is just one arm of his program, which also includes his website and Facebook page. You will find this app very well thought out.
- Quickly and easily track your daily food intake
- Input each meal directly to your device
- View graphs of your daily or weekly progress
- Find sugar and carb values for over 7,500 food items
- Search for food items
- Add new foods to the database
- Mark food items as favorites for quicker entry
Last but certainly not least is Carb Master – Daily Carbohydrate Tracker. The fact that this app has the stats on 110,000, (yes all those zeros are correct) individual foods is enough to make me want it on my iDevice! This app comes in an iPad form too but I opted to buy the iPhone version because I can use it on both. It’s a carb-counting app, I really don’t care if it’s optimized for my iPad, I just want it to get the job done, and it does.
Along with being able to give you the skinny on all those foods this app can also track your water intake, weight training, has password protection so everyone in the world doesn’t know your weight like they do mine now, and it will display your daily carb consumption as a badge right on it’s icon so you don’t even have to open the app to see where you stand for the day.
- Over 110,000 food items in the database with popular restaurant and brands
- Track your daily carbs and other nutrition on calendar view
- Set your daily goal and view diff on charts
- Email your carb logs as well as other nutrition
- Add and categorize your custom food
- Create your own recipes
- Add food as favorites
- Food search
- Water and weight tracking
- Password protection
So there you have it, six apps for counting carbs to help you lose weight. Of course the app(s) that will work best for you depends on your lifestyle and what you want the app to accomplish. Given those choices I opted to keep two apps on my iPad and iPhone; Carb Master – Daily Carbohydrate Tracker for its huge food database as well as the ease of entering the foods I eat during the day, and the Belly Fat Cure Sugar and Carb Counter just because it is part of a system that is known for results and is part of Jorge Cruise’s bigger picture and opportunity.
If I was into exercise, which my video clearly tells you I’m not I probably would have included Daily Carb Premium in my list, and either of the freebies are a no-brainer if you have room on your phone. Each of them will help you count carbs and help you lose those pounds you’ve been looking to shed!
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