“Food Journals Double Weight-loss” says the American journal of preventative medicine. But keeping a food journal is not at all as easy as it sounds, if you have ever tried it. Having tried many calorie tracking apps in the past, and failing each time miserably to update it and keep up with it regularly, I can say ‘Pictrition’ definitely makes the task 10x easier and simpler.
Developers of Pictrition call it a ‘game’ that helps you eat healthy, lose weight and stay on track by keeping a photo-based food journal. Being out just 3 days ago, the app is still in its early stages, so it didn’t really feel like a game yet due to the low number of users. But that really shouldn’t be your concern because, even as a standalone app it still gets most of my points. Simply put, it is as easy and simple as any food journal can get.
To make an entry, all you have to do is take your iPhone out, launch the app, tap exactly just three buttons – one to launch camera view, another to click, another to save the entry. They don’t even ask you to enter any text, which I really digged. Apart from journalling, the app lets you rate food choices of other users all around the web and all of it happens anonymously. But the cool thing about this process is that, you get only three choices to choose from – good, okay or bad. This means no more dealing with numbers or worrying about calorie counts. But ultimately these choices do get converted to numbers internally, and obviously the better food scores you get, more points you are assigned.
All your entries come in a nice scroll view in the bottom half of the main screen, with food thumbnails neatly arranged for each day with points overlaid on them. You can also track your weight, right from the main screen with just two swipes. Coming to the ‘game’ side of things, they give you a target of 500 points which you are supposed to attain each day, and these points are calculated entirely by the community, meaning how the other users rate your food choices.
One feature I would really like to see is, users getting points for eating at regular times every day, which is a very crucial element of weight loss. I didn’t see any points getting earned when I rate other’s food choices either. But like mentioned above, its the very first version of the app and looks pretty solid and promising otherwise. Developers have also announced there would be tie-ups with nutrition experts and rewards from health-care industry partners in the near future. Pictrition is available for FREE on the AppStore and is a must try if you are into any form of weight-loss or bodybuilding regimes.