That’s more often than I look in a mirror. On the other hand, per iOS 12’s new Screen Time feature, I’ve picked up and looked at my phone on average about 60 times per day in the past week. With the exception of my wife, nobody sees my phone’s home screen. And I did hide the app in a folder with a transit app that I rarely used, renaming the folder “Other.” But that just meant that I either had to dig for the app even more, or pull down in iOS and type in “FatSecret” to pull it up to log calories. “Oh, you think wearing an untucked button-down is fooling anyone? Nice try, Chunk.” Taken from another angle, it made it seem like being overweight was shameful, something to be kept secret. On the one hand, it felt like a taunt from the app-makers and the not-so-healthy parts of my brain. The name FatSecret seemed problematic from every angle. That was the URL I had to type in every time I wanted to log in my lunch of lentils or chana masala. It hung there on my phone’s screen everyday when I went to log in my two hard-boiled eggs and an apple for breakfast. The only problem was its name: FatSecret.įatSecret. There were no ads, a clean interface, a huge database of foods, the ability to easily track macros, and all of it with a simple and austere mobile app and website that was quick to load and fast to respond. It’s buried underneath 39 other options if you search “calorie counter” you have to scroll for a significant amount of time to even find it. Hunting around further, I found a recommendation for another app, hidden deep in the App Store. Lose It also kept trying to lure me into signing up for a $39.99 a year premium membership, which promised to help me do things like keep track of how much water I drank. This worked fine if I snapped a pic of, say, a can of ginger ale, but not so great if I snapped a pic of a chicken-salad sandwich. Lose It’s big promise is that you can snap photos of your food before you eat it, and it’ll calculate how many calories are in your meal. I tried MyFitnessPal’s closest competitor, Lose It, and found myself equally disenchanted. There was also the not-so-great news that 150 million MyFitnessPal accounts had been hacked earlier this year, meaning that whatever password I was using circa 2012 might be floating around the web. It had been bought by Under Armour in 2015, and it was now filled with endless entreaties to become a premium member for only $9.99 a month (or just $49.99 a year). I reinstalled the app on my phone and quickly discovered that, like everything else good from the internet in 2012 (Instagram, Grooveshark, MyFitnessPal had fallen from grace. I became aware of the stunning number of calories in tortilla chips and IPAs, and became a fan of raw almonds, apples, and chicken breasts. constantly reminds you how not hot you are.) I used an app called MyFitnessPal, which I kept on my phone and could also use on my laptop, and carefully logged my meals and snacks. (If New York constantly reminds you how not rich you are, L.A. does - I joined a gym, watched what I ate, and worked out a lot. and doing what everyone who moves to L.A. The last time I did this was in 2012, when I was living in L.A. Bank blazer for formal occasions this spring and summer, and decided to start tracking my diet again. (I also discovered that Donald Trump and I now share the same ostensible BMI - a real moment of looking into the abyss.) I bought a crappy Jos. This spring, while putting on a suit jacket that had fit me fine last year, I found that I could barely button it, and only if I shifted things around and stood very, very still. The icon for FatSecret, a really fantastic calorie-counting app with a really bad name.
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