For most people who resolve to shed pounds after the holidays, the decision means shelling out cash — on packaged foods, books, health club memberships, a scale, liposuction consultations. Problem is, the only thing many people end up losing is money.

 

The free iPhone app Lose It! is a calorie counter and weight tracker, with tools for logging food intake.

But on a cost-per-pound basis, the newest class of weight-loss innovation could beat them all.

Free and nearly free cellphone applications for dieters and aspiring hard bodies are proliferating in the various app stores for iPhones, Android handsets, BlackBerrys and others. In some cases it feels like the Internet, circa 1999, in that companies are giving away products that seem fairly valuable.

Just as that early Internet practice screeched to a halt once everyone (well, almost everyone) came to their senses, this will too. So if you are thinking of shedding a few pounds, it might make sense to load a couple of these programs onto your phone before you devour your next pig in a blanket.

I tested a handful of the most popular applications, including Lose It! (free, for the iPhone), Calorie Counter (free, on Android and BlackBerry) and Calorie Tracker by Livestrong ($3 on iPhone, BlackBerry and Android).

Lose It!, from FitNow, is the top choice of calorie counters, with 3.5 million downloads in the 14 months since it became available. But more noteworthy is that 190,000 people have bothered to rate the app, usually with high marks, which suggests that the software has some staying power.

Based on a week or so of playing with it, the ratings are well-earned, and probably would be just as high if it cost a few dollars or more.

At its core, Lose It! is a calorie counter and weight tracker, with tools for logging and watching your food intake. Enter a few personal metrics into the program along with your weight-loss goal and deadline, and Lose It! sets a budget for your calorie intake.

The chief strength of the program is how nicely it balances simplicity and comprehensiveness. It includes nutritional information on more than 21,000 food items, including many that aren’t listed in the Agriculture Department’s database.

If a turkey sandwich is on your lunch menu, you can search for variations, including those offered by major fast-food restaurants and supermarkets. Lose It! will put you down for 725 calories (Arby’s), 230 calories (Lean Pockets) or 360 calories (home made, on whole wheat).

Checking your progress is a pleasure, at least aesthetically; nicely designed graphics show where you are in relation to your caloric budget for the day or the week.

You can also link your data to Loseit.com, where you can view detailed full-screen reports and use a new service to trade diet notes with friends (or even anonymous folks, if you don’t want to tell friends when you gain 10 pounds). Progress can be posted on Twitter orFacebook as well.

Since peer support can be so critical to dieting, it is somewhat surprising that this category of applications didn’t include social networking features from the start. The programs I tested either recently added, or will soon include, similar functions.

For the legion of people carrying Droids, myTouch 3G’s and other Android devices, among the better choices is Calorie Counter, from the software developer FatSecret (fatsecret.com).

Entering foods on Calorie Counter is, at times, slightly easier than with Lose It! Novice calorie counter that I am, I initially assumed Lose It! would add milk-related calories to my breakfast cereal. I searched for skim milk and added it just in case.

When I clicked onto Calorie Counter, it eliminated my caloric confusion — and did away with a wasted step — by offering a “Frequently Eaten With” button near the cereal. Non-iPhone versions of Calorie Counter also have a bar code scanner that helps save a step when you are logging in frequently eaten foods.

Sometimes, that is. The scanner often failed to lock onto a code, leaving me to manually type in the nutritional information for things like Marshmallow Fluff.

Calorie Tracker is a more comprehensive alternative to Lose It!, but that blessing can also be a curse. The program, part of Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong (livestrong.com) stable of brands, has millions of food items in its database, and the service’s two million members add information on new foods daily.

If Starbucks introduces a new flavored latte, Calorie Tracker’s developers say, the calorie information will show up in the database within a few days.

Still, all that information can be overwhelming, as when you are offered 1,700 different variations for a turkey sandwich. Once you’ve found what you want, though, you can log your food preference to save time in the future.

These nutrition-minded app developers know the yin and yang of fitness involves exercise more taxing than, say, texting. They also know that popular fitness programs like iFitness ($2 on the iPhone,) and Cardio Trainer (free on Android, with paid add-ons) are starting to include nutritional advice.

As a result, the calorie-counting apps have begun adding their own fitness components. Calorie Tracker now allows users to account for calories burned during exercise. And relying on Mr. Armstrong’s training team for pointers, the program will in coming months include more advanced workout tracking features. Lose It!, meanwhile, includes calorie-burning information for 102 exercises, while Calorie Counter has similar functions.

Software developers are often guilty of fattening their applications with so many new features that they end up like digital couch potatoes; slow moving and impossible to work with. But so far, these apps are carrying the extra weight nicely.

Quick Calls

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