With a new year comes new years resolutions, and my personal goal of eating healthy recently lead me to explore a new app called Lose it. One of its features gives users visuals of how large servings sizes are for various food groups. Like any other food-tracking app, you can enter in what you ate and how much you ate, but Lose it tries to help you gauge portion sizes with graphics like the one shown below.
Lose it appears to be marketed towards a younger, modern audience that wants to track their food consumption and lose weight. The app is filled with bright colors, sans-serif fonts, and motivational weight-loss phrases. The goal of the infographic, as well as the entire app, is to convince users that calorie-counting can be simple through Lose it. Remembering what items you’ve eaten in a day is hard enough, but knowing how many cups or grams of each food you consume is harder.
Lose it presents serving size data very effectively. Cups and grams are difficult for most people to gauge. I have seen various other attempts at visualizing serving sizes and few have been as effective as the ones in Lose it. Others generally compare food servings to lesser-known objects (ex: one bagel serving is the size of a hockey puck) which are still hard to understand. Lose it makes an effective presentation by using common objects (eggs, golf balls, baseballs) for comparison and including a picture of the food next to the object for reference. Combined with an easy-to-use UI, Lose it’s graphics make serving-counting much simpler.