Watch What You Eat, Using Your Phone as a Guide

I have always been skinny, but I do need to watch what I eat. So I count my calories — with the help of smartphone and tablet apps.

One of the best is Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker by MyFitnessPal. Free on iOS and Android, it’s full of features for tracking food intake and exercise.

The app asks basic questions about height, weight, age, exercise levels and target weight, and uses this data to calculate a sensible daily calorie intake. You are supposed to enter the calorie values of everything you eat; the app then helps you avoid overshooting your daily allowance.

The app has a bar code scanner so it can look up most nutritional information directly from food packaging. This worked surprisingly well for me, getting the right information for everything from Heinz tomato soup to a Portuguese variant of the French cheese La Vache Qui Rit. All you have to do is enter how much you have eaten of a particular food to help the calorie calculation.

Link