dieting

Search tech innovator Evincii, which unleashed its pharmacist-in-your-pocket app on the sick and groggy masses in late 2009, is now announcing its latest brainchild, the Shop to Lose app for those who need a little help in the grocery shopping department.

"This time we have a dietician in the pocket," Evincii CEO Charlie Koo tells me. "The ideal audience is the 200 million Americans who are overweight and obese."

The app, which features (right) a woman who doesn't appear to need it biting into an apple she probably picked without the search engine, is essentially … Read more

Anyone who has tried to lose weight knows that two things work: diet and exercise. Hiring a personal trainer might help motivate you to exercise, but studies show that keeping a journal actually helps dieters stick to the plan. That's where Calorie Balance Diet comes in. It's a free utility that makes it entirely too easy to figure out just how many calories you need to achieve your dietary goal, and what foods you should and shouldn't eat to help you stay on track. It also helps you keep useful schedules and records.

A simple wizard lets … Read more

Given its name, Perfect Diet Tracker had a lot to live up to. We've seen a lot of programs of this sort that were mediocre at best, so we admit that we were a bit skeptical at first. However, Perfect Diet Tracker may actually be deserving of its name; it's among the best we've seen.

The program's interface is outstanding, with a sleek and entirely professional-looking design. Everything about it is easy to navigate and understand. The program contains the typical features that you would expect from such a program; users enter their current and goal … Read more

When my eating starts getting out of control, I usually fire up the Lose It app to keep tabs on my calories for a few days.

Of course, it's a hassle to have to manually enter the foods I eat. Enter FoodScanner, a new app that scans package bar codes for quick and easy calorie logging.

Does it work? It does. Is it just as cool as it sounds? It is. Will it earn a spot in one of Apple's "There's an app for that" commercials? Almost certainly. It's just that slick.

To use … Read more

Epicurious Recipes and Shopping List is a free app that gives you quick and easy access to more than 25,000 tested recipes from Epicurious.com--originally from sources such as Bon Appetit, Cookie, and Gourmet magazines--along with the ability to save your favorites and create shopping lists for specific recipes.

The app's primary interface divides recipes into broad categories like "Weeknight Dinner" and "Party Snacks," but far more useful and easy to navigate is the app's search function, which lets you search for keywords and select a particular ingredient, course, cuisine, "dietary consideration&… Read more

Not long ago they were everyday people: a video game developer, a trial lawyer, a Gap manager, just doing their thing with little in common.

Then YouTube came along, their videos went viral, and they became Web sensations almost overnight.

You know these three prominent examples of the YouTube celebrity class of 2006: Matt Harding, the goofy dancer in the "Where the Hell is Matt?" videos; Stephen Voltz, one of the mad scientists in the "Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments" video; and Kentucky fashionista William Sledd with his flamboyant, witty, and brutally honest "Ask a Gay Man&… Read more

At the American Chemical Society's 238th National Meeting in Washington Monday, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced "the first practical 'electronic tongue' sensor" that identifies sources of sweetness and then changes colors depending on the type and quantity of sweeteners present.

Under the leadership of chemistry professor Kenneth S. Suslick--who may or may not return my phone call to explain, among other pressing matters, what is going on in his university Web site photograph--the Illinois team developed a sensor about the size of a business card that can simply be dipped into food samples. "We take things that smell or taste and convert their chemical properties into a visual image," Suslick said in a press release.

I can't help but cut to an image of a white-tablecloth restaurant with a little sign that asks patrons to please be discreet when pulling out their tongues.… Read more

Diet Buddy allows users to track their weight loss and also offers a 16-week fitness program. Although the software is easy to use, it has some significant flaws.

Diet Buddy's interface is not terribly attractive, but it is at least intuitive; a good thing since there's no Help file. Users enter their weight and body measurements at the beginning and continue to track them over time; Diet Buddy provides a graph allowing users to track their progress. The rest of the content is questionable at best, and we get the sense that the program's developer used whatever … Read more

SousChef is a sleek, easy-to-use cooking tool for collecting, organizing, searching, modifying, and sharing--and even blogging about and cooking from--your recipes. SousChef provides a very straightforward interface for navigating your recipe collection, but its stand-out features are its import tools and full-screen Cook mode. If you paste in recipes as text, SousChef prompts you to drag boxes over the different parts of the recipe, so it can automatically organize ingredients, instructions, notes, and so on. If you want to cook from a recipe, SousChef has an easy-to-read, full-screen "10-foot mode" that lets you keep your computer at a … Read more