Spurred by the movement around self-tracking, there are apps that can track your steps, runs, and rides, but tracking what you eat still requires continuous input from the user. Food tracking apps and books have been around for a while now, but a start-up based out of Amsterdam, Foodzy is a web based app that lets players compare, compete, and cooperate to maintain a healthy lifestyle, lose weight, or keep track of diet and nutrition. The service launched into beta in April 2011, but recently opened up the game to the public.
The game is not for dieting, “Foodzy’s primary goal is not to be all about health or weight loss. Foodzy believes the best diet is to eat well, varied and enjoy food.” It approaches the problem of nutrition from a positive perspective, and largely assumes that if diet and eating habits are made fun and social, that they can improve organically. Foodzy founder, Marjolijn Kamphuis, told FastCompany, “By introducing game and social elements in your eating habits, we try to encourage people to maintain a healthy lifestyle over long term, and bring back the fun in enjoying food with friends.”
There are some elements that make Foodzy more intriguing than many of the other options for tracking nutrition. Similar to Weight Watchers, Foodzy uses its own points, called bits, that are tied to calories but take into account age, height, and gender in order compare evenly across users. One bit loosely corresponds to 20 calories. But Foodzy also allows users to input their own product profiles and compare diets between players. It makes daily meals into a much more social event by allowing friends to share the information, no matter if they are dining at the same table or not.
Been playing around with Foodzy. They said its not a weightloss programme, but frankly if that’s the case I am not sure where the fun element is in all of this. If Foodzy gave me a better suggestion as to what to eat next, based on a personal voluntary profile of what I like, I’d find it far more valuable. Too much like work at this stage.
Overall…unimpressed with the Foodzy app. The best weight loss app for the iPhone is hands down intelli-Diet (http://intelli-Diet.com). This app is fantastic in that it takes into account what you have in your pantry and the food that you like and it plans out a diet for you to follow based on the amount of weight that you want to lose and also how you currently weight and how tall you are. It will tell you based on the data that you input how long it will take you to reach the weight that you want to be. If you are lucky enough to have reached your goal, it tells you how to maintain it. The app allows you to email your plan to an email address which is good because I often want to print my daily plan and I do not have a way to do that off of my iPhone. I have bought one for my sister as a birthday present and she reports that it is the best diet app that she has ever used. She and I hate to count calories and the beauty of this diet is that you do not have to count anything. The app does all the counting and figuring for you. I hate the entire serving size calculations that many diets require and there is none of that calculating while using this app. Another very cool thing about this app is that it gives you many alternatives to the menus that it suggests and you can just refresh the screen to bring up another suggestion. The app has a water tracker for folks like me who forget to drink water and it even has a reminder function to remind you that it is time for a snack or whatever. This app is super!