Losing weight is hard work. Whatever diet or fitness routine you decide to implement, you need the right advice from trusted sources and the absolute will to stick to your plans. These sites and apps provide the knowledge and motivation to lose weight and keep it off.
1. Fat2Lose (Web): Reliable Guide to Essential Information Towards Weight Loss
The internet overwhelms you with different websites, articles, and tips on how to lose weight fast. Still, you have to wonder how reliable and efficient they are. You are not the first to wonder which resource to trust. Another such netizen got tired of sifting through all unreliable data to find “actionable, bullshit-free advice” and put it all on one free website.
At Fat2Lose, the idea is to focus on these two key principles of weight loss: motivation and knowledge. It’s broadly divided into sections for a weight loss checklist, turning bad habits into good ones, understanding how your body works, books to read to lose weightfitness apps to burn fat, different types of diets, supplements to improve your health, sustainable exercises and smart devices to track your weight loss.
Each section contains reliable data prepared personally by the author based on studies, books, people’s experiences and the author’s journey to lose 45 pounds of weight. None of the advice here is revolutionary. But the goal is not to tell you something you didn’t know before; it’s to tell you that’s all that matters, and you can ignore the fad diets and short-term fad advice you often read on blogs.
2. Food psychology (Ebook): 4-part ebook series to understand why and how you eat
Your weight is directly related to how you consume food. And we all have a unique relationship with food, formed over years of subconscious behavior. The Food Psychology Institute wants to help you understand why and how you eat, to break unhealthy patterns and habits.
To help you get started, founder Marc David, along with other food psychology experts, has put together a 4-part e-book series along with companion videos. It’s completely free with each game sent in one installment after completing the previous one.
The first book covers seven principles of food psychology and how body image and metabolism affect you. The second book dives into the science behind why you need to pay more attention to how you eat. The third book offers practical advice for implementing what you have learned by making behavior changes. The fourth book is more of a sales pitch for joining the organization; you can ignore it if you want.
3. Balance (Android) and happy scale (iOS): track your weight the healthy, guilt-free way
Your weight loss journey requires regular weigh-ins to check on your progress. But the fact is that our weight fluctuates due to several normal day-to-day factors. It can be disheartening to see the scale go up even when you’ve been on your best behavior for two days. In such cases, it’s easy to lose sight of the real progress you’ve made so far. This is the fallacy that these two applications attempt to correct.
Libra and Happy Scale both display your weight trend, rather than noting the exact number on a daily chart. Their algorithms want to motivate you rather than discourage or alarm you. For example, if your scale is high today, the app will use a point in the past to compare it to, so you get a realistic and happier judgment of your progress. Unlike many other apps, it also eschews judgmental words to spur you on, no matter how well-meaning. In a nutshell, it’s a weight tracker for those who want good data without feeling guilty.
You can also set long and short term weight goals to track your progress and count steps. Happy Scale also includes a “Prediction” meter to show when you are likely to reach your goals based on your current trends or if your weight loss trend should change slightly. They are really among best weight loss apps you should install.
To download: scale for android (Free)
To download: Happy scale for iOS (Free)
4. Snapsie (iOS) and body tracker (Android): Selfie Progress Pictures to see weight loss
On days when your scale shows a higher weight and you’re not happy with the image in the mirror, you need a little more motivation to keep going. But do you remember what the image in the mirror was like when you started your weight loss journey? Snapsie and Body Tracker remember this.
These apps encourage you to take regular selfies to track your body’s progress. You must have seen these progress photos posted online before, but if you’re not confident in your body, you might be hesitant to click the selfies. Snapsie and Body Tracker are both private, non-judgmental spaces – you don’t have to share it with anyone if you don’t want to. And yes, they offer password protection so that someone else doesn’t accidentally see them.
The best feature of Body Tracker is to track different parts of your body. You don’t have to take a single selfie, you can take multiple photos of different parts like your belly, arms, hips, etc.
In Snapsie, you can choose to take a photo with an overlay of your previous photo. This way you compare selfies much better since they have the same dimensions.
To download: body tracker for android (Free)
To download: Snapsie for iOS (Free)
5. Weigh (Android, iOS): Motivate your friends to achieve weight goals together
Studies have shown that you’re more likely to achieve your goals and stay on track with good habits if you do it in a group. Weighlos is one of the best social fitness apps for setting weight loss goals with friends and motivating each other to achieve them as a group.
The group creator can set a weekly goal, in kilograms/pounds or in percentages. The percentage-based idea is pretty cool, allowing users to keep their weights private and protected while sharing their progress with the group. But that’s not necessarily always the fairest approach, so you should talk with your group and decide on the best kind of goal for all of you as a collective.
Speaking of talking with the group, Weighlos has a built-in chat app to send messages to each other. And you’ll also see your individual and group stats and trends. You can also join multiple groups.
Weighlos respects privacy and does not sell your data to third parties. In fact, it is also completely ad-free even in the free version.
To download: weigh for android | iOS (Free)
Diet beats exercise for weight loss
This combination of knowledge and motivation, available in various ways through these sites and apps, is essential to support your weight loss journey. You probably know that losing weight is all about consuming fewer calories than you expend. But you might be tempted to burn extra calories by exercising.
But several studies and meta-analyses of studies have shown that diet matters more than exercise when it comes to losing weight. Now, there is no one diet that is better than the others, and it will depend on the individual. What matters is picking one you stick with. As nutritional biochemist Shawn H. Talbott says, “You can’t exercise more than you can with a bad diet.
