Dear Iphone Gods - please keep me on track.

Happy Thursday twitlossers. I was going to do a great big blog post on me and how I got to the point I am now, but honestly... the short versions is up on my page. Being a mom is about balance and over the last 10 years I lost it. I am working on that, so instead I am going to talk about my tools of the trade.

First and foremost...... to lose weight you have to track. I have to track. Maybe I should say that again to really get it in my head. When I don't track, I cheat and cheaters never win. Well except maybe in board games and only if you don't get caught. The truth is I have tried a lot of different tracking systems - ranging from Weight Watchers to the free sites like Daily Plate and Sparkpeople. Lots of people adore these sites, and they are hugely helpful. Yet I get bored easily and lose focus - I don't want to sit at my computer and enter in food when I could be doing something else. Enter..... my iphone.

Just like my kindle, I wonder how I ever lived without my iphone. So many useful apps, so many features that simply my life. First, Tweetdeck.... I can sync my twitter on my laptop to my iphone and never miss a #twitloss conversation. But most importantly? The iPhone Daily Burn apps. Yes, I said, apps.... because there is more than one.

First, to use them you need a FREE account from their website : Daily Burn. It is much like the Daily Plate and Sparkpeople... just a simple site to track calories, exercise, and more. Once you have an account you can use the free Daily Burn iphone app to track your food, as well as workouts and more, wherever you are and it will sync to your online account.

Now comes the really cool app... The Daily Burn Food Scanner. This super cool tool uses the iphone camera to scan the UPC symbol on products, then uses the UPC to find nutrition data. Once it pulls up the nutrition data you can add it to your daily food journal as something you ate. You can also favorite things so you don't have to rescan things you eat every day. If it doesnt find your food in the UPC database, you can do a keyword search and then link that UPC to the correct food in the database. So easy to use and it syncs with your online account, so it also syncs with the regular Daily Burn tracker app.

Since my iphone is superglued to my hand, theory is that these apps should keep me interested and on track. I am aiming to lose 25lbs during these first 90 days of the the #twitloss challenge. Get out your pom poms and cheer me (ehhh us!) on, we need it!

What are you tracking tips and tricks? Or check, any favorite iphone apps? I can always use more ;)