Daily Burn with FoodScanner will Help you Keep your Resolutions!

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

New Years Resolution 2010 time! Who is with me?? I suspect more than a few! Luckily we have the wonderful world of apps to draw from in order to help us keep our butt going to the gym and the donuts out of our guts! I have been making a ritual of going through the app store and trying out every fitness/nutrition app and website that comes along. Let’s just say my little internet addiction is not enhancing my girlish figure! After many trials and errors I have discovered the Daily Burn app (App Store) , and the FoodScanner app (App Store) which are part and parcel of the dailyburn.com website. I suspect it will have some staying power!

Daily Burn has been around for a while, having had it’s first incarnation as Gyminee. Yes I checked it out back then, and found it lacking. However in May of 2009 Gyminee became Daily Burn and gleefully announced that $525K in seed money had been invested in the site, and presumably the apps. Tim Ferriss, the 4 hour work week guy, among others, put alot of money and talent into the site and really gave it that six pack ab look. Weak sand in the face Gyminee became muscle bound Daily Burn! This feature-rich site and the accompanying apps give the user a great GUI and one stop fitness and nutrition tracking social network! While you can get a free account on Daily Burn you will probably want to upgrade to the Pro or even Elite accounts to unlock even more features.

This is a great video of Daily Burn CEO Andy Smith describing their site.

Daily Burn is first and foremost a tracker and goal setter for each user. You track your weight, nutrition intake, and fitness activities for each day on your Locker Room page. Finding out exactly how many calories, protein, fat, fibre, etc. you have consumed each day can be a real eye-opener!

I discovered I was not eating nearly enough protein to reach my weight loss goal. Rather ironic that you need to eat to lose weight but it is a well known fact that protein helps build muscle and muscle helps boost metabolism and high metabolism burns fat! I have found this nutrition tracking interface to be very easy compared to others.

The list of pre-loaded foods is constantly increasing and they pop up quickly as you search for your food. Daily Burn’s food scanner app will allow you to scan UPC codes using your mobile iPhone and seamlessly import that information into your daily counts even when you are out and about. Unfortunately it does not seem to work on foods outside of the USA yet. Hopefully that will be corrected.

The Daily Burn app gives you a neat on the go summary of your activities, as well as a simple interface to enter food, exercise and weight. The workout information is helpful for those of you who need reminders at the gym, to keep your workout on track.

You can plan your meals, generate shopping lists and add your own recipes and calculate exact intakes. Fitness can be tracked easily as well. Select either a program or minutes of exercises, create your own workouts, or follow a workout posted by another user.

Information abounds on exercises for each body part and type of goal whether that be losing fat or increasing strength or both! Your weight is tracked in a nice big graph, showing your progress over the week, the month or the year. Daily Burn sends you a weekly report of your progress, showing each day you meet your goals as a little fire, the more little fires, the better!

All of this self-tracking can get a bit self-indulgent however and the fun part of Daily Burn is the social network component. You can pull your own friends into the site and make them your “motivators”, or you can find and friend people who are already burning daily and learn from their progress as inspiration for your own journey. There are forums, groups, and challenges, all of which provide information and motivation, something that can be lacking with other sites. All these are fully searchable so you can find just the right motivation you are looking for.

So all in all I would have to say I am sold. I signed on to a $74.95 per year Pro account which is much cheaper than a personal trainer and yet it allows you to become self-motivated to record all of your information, which is really what a lifestyle change is all about. I highly recommend this tool to all internet addicts everywhere, let the power of Daily Burn fire up your life in a tangible way in 2010!

Daily Burn is free to download in the App Store (iTunes Link).

Food Scanner is currently available in the App Store for $0.99 (iTunes Link).