Lose It is an app designed to help you lose unwanted weight! It allows you to set goals and build a daily calorie budget that is realistic enough you can meet them. Lose It is effective because you can stay on track by easily recording/entering your food and exercise.

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In our daily lives, we are inundated with media ads, television and radio commercials in by which companies use to sell exercise equipment, fat burner supplements, and lose weight fast diets, to name a few. For those of us who have spent our hard earned money on these products, we know that most of them do not work.

Corporate America wants us to believe that being overweight is due to fat and that we need to get rid of it. The myth is that fat and carbohydrates our our enemies. The truth of the matter is that we need our body fat, as well as carbohydrates for energy, used during body metabolism in order to burn up the extra calories.

Although we do need to burn fat as well as calories, most people will not lose weight without burning calories. Not having enough body fat, is as detrimental to our heath when we have too much fat. You can find ways to evaluate your body fat percentage, BMI, online. The recommendations for men is to be at 15-20% fat, while women should be around 19-25%. Technically, body fat is a fuel. The burning of calories is the only way to use up the excess fuel.

One of the most important fat burners is cost free. All you need to do is to begin a healthy diet with added fruits and vegetables. Contrary to belief, potatoes are a great source for Vitamin C. The potato does not create fat, it is the butter, cream cheese, or sour cream that is added which adds the fat and extra calories.

Changing from white bread, rice, noodles to whole grains are going to provide you with the fiber that is needed as well. Drinking low fat milk, as well as eating yogurt, also are great changes to make diet changes.

Another great fat burning method is to exercise daily, for at least 20-30 minutes. Taking a brisk walk, going for a bicycle ride, even swimming helps with burning the excess calories leading to fat loss as well. Pilates are great exercises for fat burning, the burning of excess calories, as well as for body toning, especially around the abdominal area, without stress on the body.

In order to begin a healthy diet, you can talk to a nutritionist, follow the diabetic diet or weight watchers diet which are great for even the expectant mom in order to begin eating healthy. Unless you change your lifestyle and dietary habits, there is not any magic pill to get rid of excess fat and weight, let alone keep it off.

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Tap & Track has a strong recommendation by The New York Times as one of the 4 comprehensive diet apps ideal for losing weight and counting carbs! It’s a paid app and according to users, worth every penny!

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Fruits and vegetables exert a substantial thermogenic effect because carbohydrate in general is moderately thermogenic, and fiber is highly thermogenic.

Thermogenic ( To produce heat in the fat burning process.)

However, some fruits and vegetables are more carbohydrate-dense than others. For example, potatoes are thermogenic and so are bananas, but they also contain more active carbohydrate than do apples or strawberries.

Stated differently, apples and strawberries are more thermogenic per unit of carbohydrate. Cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower are so thermogenic per unit of carbohydrate that they do not count toward your daily carbohydrate limit.

- Everyone knows that broccoli has relatively few total calories, but, in view of its strong thermogenic effect, broccoli has even fewer actual calories.

You will want to eat carbohydrate foods that have high thermogenic per unit of carbohydrate. This will allow you to consume a greater volume of food than if you were eating foods of a higher carbohydrate density. A greater volume of food is positively correlated not only with metabolic rate but also with satiety. Food volume is important in appetite regulation, because gastric distention and intestinal stimulation send “I’m full” signal to your brain.

Many breakfast cereals, for example, are high in fiber, but have a low thermogenic/carbohydrate ratio. You are limited in how much of such foods you can eat, and bird-like portions are neither satisfying nor significantly increase metabolic rate.

High-fiber/high-water-content (HIFWAC) fruits and non-starchy vegetables are ideal for optimizing thermogenesis.

Conversely, consuming carbohydrate foods low in water and fiber will force you to miniaturize your portion sizes in order to stay within carb limits. HIFWAC fruits are less carbohydrate-dense, and thus have greater thermogenic value per unit of carbohydrate than do other fruits.

HIFWAC Fruits
(Excellent Thermogenic/Carbohydrate Ratio)
Apples, Apricots, Blueberries, Cherries, Grapes, Peaches, Pears, Raspberries, Strawberries

Non-HIFW AC Fruits
(Inferior Thermogenic/Carbohydrate Ratio)
Bananas, Dates, Dried Fruit, Figs, Raisins, Watermelon

An easy way to identify which carbohydrate foods have high thermogenic value per unit of carbohydrate is to assess “active carbs”. The lower the active carb rating of a particular carbohydrate food, the more thermogenic that food is per unit of carbohydrate.

The reason for this correspondence is that, by calculating active carbs, you are subtracting fiber (the non-caloric thermogenic element) from total carbohydrate. Accordingly, active carbs can be viewed as a measure of how “unthermogenic” a food is per unit of carbohydrate. .

Lower Active Carb Content = More Thermogenic Per Unit of Carbohydrate = Greater Volume Per Unit of Carbohydrate

To illustrate how widely foods vary in volume and thermogenic potency per unit of carbohydrate, consider that in terms of active carbohydrate: