How Many Calories Do You Burn?

A sound body means a sound mind. Eat better, exercise regularly, get enough sleep and reduce the amount of stress by doing meditation or walking in the park, and you will be happier and more productive at work. But as a 24/7 entrepreneur, how do you develop that kind of lifestyle? Simple – you set up your goals, measure your progress and make your peers accountable for your performance. We encountered a perfect tool that does that for you, and already serves over 19 million users worldwide.

Swedish lifestyle tracking app Lifesum has been in the tech news for the number of reasons. Last year the company successfully closed $10M in series B round lead by Nokia Growth Partners. Earlier they were able to raise $6.7M A-round, which made it the largest first round financing in Europe in 2014.

Just recently they launched a new version of the app, which immediately hit AppStore and Google Play charts. The new version has two new features available for users in Europe – Health Score and New Plans. Health Score gamifies the rewards process for eating and exercising by offering a personalised health test, which ranks a user’s overall health.

The Health Score is crucial for helping our users motivate themselves to make healthier choices, and to personalise the experience, making it easier for our users to achieve their goals. To back this up, 2012 research from the University of Chicago found that those who were rewarded upon the completion of a test took the test more seriously the next time around. Health Score helps give our users that little push that they sometimes need, while also adding an exciting gamification element.” – comments Henrik Torstensson, CEO and co-founder of Lifesum.

The second addition to the app is ‘New Plans’ – a feature that makes it easier for you to choose the best diet, based on your personal goals. As a response to the numerous benefits ascribed to the Mediterranean and Nordic diets, Lifesum added five new Plans to its existing model. Depending on whether your aim is to lose weight, gain weight, or just get healthier, you will receive personalised feedback based on their goal, what they eat and drink, as well as physical activity.

The Finnish startup YouApp is also in a similar space, but what we really liked about Lifesum was that it allows you to measure exactly how many calories you consumed and burnt during the day.

Most competitors make that process rather cumbersome, but Lifesum let’s you register all your health related activities in a really easy. For example, Lifesum allows you to scan barcodes of a product, search and manually input information to match an item with over 5 million pre-loaded food types or meals, or customise your own meals for assessment. Talking about meals, the app has plenty of recipes powered with nutrition information so you would know exactly how much calories each meal contains. This is perfect for all the fitness geeks and foodies that take their meal plans seriously.

Although the app has all that awesome good features, we found it somewhat challenging to stick to, which is a problem that many lifestyle change apps encounter. Like with other similar apps, you still need to log every single meal, manually input data and it is not really their fault. There is not centralised database of all the foods available. Plus, your daily bowl of salad may contain different amount of calories, due to a different dressing for example.

Perhaps we still need to wait for some device that will automatically log everything we do, until then – this is a pretty good fit for you if you want to track your diet and make a change to your lifestyle.

Download from iTunes and Google Play