A Lose It! alternative for the restaurant table.

Lose It!

Lose It!, in its own words.

Lose It! calls itself “Weight Loss That Fits”, and its homepage sums up the ways in: “Say It. Snap It. Scan It.” Its Smart Camera takes a picture of your food and helps you add it; the scanner reads barcodes and can fill in a new food from its label; it connects to Apple Health and Google Fit for exercise, adds water, protein and carb targets, and emails reports on your progress. It is made by FitNow, Inc., a Ziff Davis company.

Its App Store listing describes a food database of more than 56 million items, and puts photo meal entry, AI voice and the barcode scanner among the features of its Premium plan.

A different question

Not “am I on plan?” but “what did we eat?”

Sunday dim sum in Vancouver with Mei and her parents: har gow, siu mai, cheung fun, turnip cake, egg tarts, nine baskets in all, everyone reaching. A weight-loss app wants exact entries per person. Most people just skip the meal — and the skipped meal is the one they would most like to remember.

PlateDiary works the other way round. One photo keeps every basket as its own save, under the restaurant, with Mei tagged as a companion. If you turn Calories on, a read puts a rough number on each dish, and you edit any of them to the share you actually ate. Next Sunday, the place page shows your usual.

Side by side

Lose It! and PlateDiary.

Sixty-second quiz

Five questions to pick the right one.

Three or more for one side? There’s your answer. A tie usually means you’d use Lose It! at home and PlateDiary out. We make PlateDiary, so weigh that in.

• Do you step on a scale and want a line on a chart? Lose It!.
• Do you scan granola bars and yoghurt pots? Lose It!.
• Is your problem the meals out, not the meals in? PlateDiary.
• Do you share plates more often than not? PlateDiary.
• Would you rather nobody had an email address tied to what you eat? PlateDiary.

What it won’t do

What PlateDiary won’t do, so you know before you switch.

• No barcode scanner and no food database to search.
• No exercise, steps or weight.
• No meal plans, coaching or targets set for you — only an optional daily number you choose.
• No red or green days; past your number reads “~250 past”, in the same colour as “~750 left”.
• A photo estimate is a rough number. PlateDiary says so on the page: photo estimates usually run low.

In PlateDiary

A rough number for the dishes you save — only if you want one.

Sources

Where the facts come from