Palm and Treo Hacks

Lose Weight the Palm Way

The best way to lose weight is to count calories and exercise regularly, while tracking your progress. Your Palm device can make this easier.

If you simply eat less food, your body will adjust by slowing your metabolism. The best way to counteract this slowing is to increase your exercise at the same time you are decreasing your calories.

Tracking all of this information is complex. How many calories were in that donut you had for a snack? How many calories do you burn while walking a mile? And if you successfully lose weight, how does that affect the calories you burn during exercise?

Calorie and Exercise Counters

There are applications such as BalanceLog (http://www.healthetech.com) that can manage this information for you. BalanceLog contains lists of foods and exercises and the related calorie amounts. You can see a summary in Figure 2-7. For exercise, the calories burned per hour is adjusted by your weight. As you lose weight, you burn fewer calories. Having a program on your Palm device to track this is nice because you usually have your Palm device with you. Thus, you can enter meals and exercise in a timely fashion, instead of entering them when you get home and having to remember back over the day.

Figure 2-7. Daily summary in BalanceLog

Sustained weight loss only comes with regular attention to the details—food and exercise. As always, check with a doctor ...