Hamburgers are amazing. The feeling I get after taking a bite is like heavenly bliss.
I love jollof rice(An African delicacy, cooked best by Nigerians). The taste of a professionally cooked jollof rice will leave you vulnerable.

If I begin to list the kind of foods, snacks, etc that I love to consume, the list would be endless.

The truth is, there are a lot of things we love to eat or drink. That's not a bad thing at all. Food is one of the major necessities for man's survival. We explored the dynamics of food making and came up with several delicacies which we love.

But what a lot of people don't know is that the intake of these foods, if uncontrolled, can affect our health.

I could recall while in junior high school, we were taught balanced diet. Well, today, not a lot of people care about that. Today, we eat whatever satisfies our cravings.
Sadly, I'm one of those people who care less about eating a balanced diet. At least not until recently.

While I was in college, junks were my best friend. I ate all manner of junks. From hamburgers to french fries, to spring rolls, to every other junk you can think of.

Inside every kind of food, fruit or snacks, there is a phenomenon called "calories".
The quantity of it contained in a meal isn't constant though. Amount of calories in a substance varies. It could be high, low or even negligible.

While I was quite uninformed, I used to think calories are a bad thing.
Well, you don't have to blame me.
Some health practitioners made it seem like a very bad thing.

In the actual sense, calories aren't bad. In fact, calories are necessary elements we all need.

I don't know how best to explain it, so I searched on google and got these definitions;

A calorie is a unit that is used to measure energy. The Calorie you see on a food package is actually a kilocalorie or 1,000 calories. A Calorie (kcal) is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water 1 degree Celsius.

A calorie is a unit of measurement — but it doesn't measure weight or length. A calorie is a unit of energy.
When you hear something contains 100 calories, it's a way of describing how much energy your body could get from eating or drinking it.

The definitions are quite similar but the second definition is simpler to understand.

From these definitions, you can see that our bodies actually need calories. Calories are like human fuel.
But then, I don't know if you are familiar with this saying

Too much of everything is bad (This saying is quite popular in Nigeria).

What I'm trying to say is that too much of these calories are bad for our health. Except you are really skinny and you could do with some weight boost.
Other than that, taking in too many calories without burning them off through activities, would lead to overweight. Overweight is not checked would lead to obesity. Then all the health complications that accompany obesity starts to kick in.

This discussion about calories would continue later in this article.

This article is in line with my series "Simple mobile apps to help you manage your activities, resources, and health".

This series started over three (3) weeks ago and it is gradually coming to an end.

The aim of the series was to discuss three concepts. It initially started with two though.

The concepts are;

• Activity tracking (Time management)
• Income and expenses tracking (Resources management)
• Weight tracking (Health management)

So far, all three concepts have been discussed. But under the health management concept, I opted two discuss two apps.

The last article I published, was the final part of the first health app I said I will review.

I discussed the app in two separate articles. The first article was an introduction to the concept of weight tracking. I did a lot of talking about weight tracking in that article. Furthermore, I went on to say a few things about the app I was reviewing under the concept.

In the second article, I reviewed the features of the app. I shared my experience and gave my opinions about each feature.

This article will begin my discussion about the second app under the health management concept.

The app is Waistline.

Waistline is quite similar to OpenScale but, there are some dissimilarities

These are the talking points in this article;

• What is Waistline?
• How does the app work?
• Why it is important to watch your calorie intake.
• Does calorie counting work?
• Summary.

Without further ado, let's delve into the discussion for today.

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Waistline: Libre calorie counter app for Android.

Are you aware of the amount of calories you consume each day?
Do you wish to gain or lose weight?
Did you know that you could easily track your weight loss or gain by using an app?

I'm sure you answered these very easy questions while reading through.

Well, I'm mostly concerned about the last question.

The answer to that question is YES!.

There are lots of apps you could track your calorie intake with and simultaneously your weight. But in this article, I will be discussing Waistline.

I can guess the question in your head right now is, "What is Waistline?"

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What is Waistline?

Waistline is an Android software developed by David Healey.
The app is designed to help users track their calorie count. The app can also allow a user to track their weight based on calorie intake.

Here is the app's description on F-droid.

Waistline is a calorie counter and weight tracker that allows the user to keep a diary of the food they eat and variations in their weight. All data is kept on the user's device and can be exported or imported easily when needed. The app includes a barcode scanner that connects to the Open Food Facts database to pull in product information.

I did some digging and found out that the first public version of the app was released May last year.
The app has garnered quite a reasonable amount of attention. It has over 100,000 downloads on google play store. That's not a lot, but, that is something.

The project owner has been active with this project and that's a good thing.

This app is only available to Android users. Once again, bad luck for iOS users. Although they might find other software with similar functionality.

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How does the app work?

In this section, I will be discussing briefly how the app works. You will get more concise information when I review the app's features.

Waistline like I already stated is a calorie counter and a weight tracker. The weight tracking makes it almost similar to OpenScale, but they are different.

When you launch the app for the first time after installation, you are greeted with a slide of a "user guide".
This is something I really like. I expressed my displeasure about OpenScale not having this user guide slides.
The user guide is quite informative.

So the first slide is about the "Basics"

The Second slide talks about the statistics feature in the app.

The third slide is about the in-app diary.

The slide goes on and on up to the app's license.

The project owner really went into detail about the app's features in that user guide.
With the aid of the user guide, users should find it easy to navigate around the app's environment.

After you are done reading the user guide, you can then begin work on the app by navigating to the diary.

To do that, click the three (3) horizontal lines on the top left of the app and goto diary.

The diary is where you record your daily food intake.

From this part, things could get tricky. Especially if you didn't read the user guide.

In the diary, there are four (4) meals categories. They are; breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. You can add more of these categories from the app's settings.

So what you do is; click on the meal category, then add the food you ate.
There are also different categories here. What you ate could either be a food, meal or recipes. That's according to the app though. I generalize all as food. They are different things on the app though.

Now you can search for the food, meal or recipe either off the internet or if you manually created it before.

So searching on the internet for Nigerian foods proved abortive. It was weird though. I thought our delicacies were global now.
Well, this wasn't really a case of being global or not.
This app utilizes Open food facts database. That means if your food, meal or recipe isn't in that database, you can't search for it.

The best option is to enter the food details manually. This was quite a tiring though.
You will have to do thorough research of the food you want to add and get correct information.
The information needed are;

• The amount of calories the food contains
• The volume of fat
• The volume of saturated fat
• Volume of carbohydrates
• The volume of sugar etc.

Here's the screenshot of the form.

If you know the foods you eat regularly, you can take a day to research about them and enter the appropriate details. It is a once in a lifetime thing. Once you create that food information, you don't need to create it again.

Another thing you can do on the app is set Goals.

You can set different kinds of goals on the app.

You can set your weight goals, your daily calorie intake goals, daily protein intake goals, etc.

To track your progress, you goto the statistics page.

It shows the information of your progress so far on a chart.

I take my word back about briefly discussing how the app works. This is the almost the entirety of how the app works. I had to save little for the next article, where I would be reviewing the app's features extensively.

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Why it is important to watch your calorie intake.

I will share five points on why it is important to keep track of your calorie intake.

1. Your body counts them, so you need to as well
2. People suck at estimating calorie intake and expenditure
3. It makes monitoring progress easier
4. People who tell you calories don’t count are usually promoting a guru system or dogmatic approach.
5. It allows for dietary freedom

This part of this article was sourced from the internet and not my own ideas.
Here is the source link

I find the article insightful. You can read it too.

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Does calorie counting work?

As part of my research into calories and their effect on our body weight, I asked myself this question,

Does calorie counting work?

Well, I found my answer in this article

In the article, the writer talked about a lot of things.

First, the writer explained what a calorie is. The writer also talked about how our bodies use these calories. Finally, the writer explained why counting calories generally works.

I had a wonderful time reading that article. I strongly advise you have a look at it too.

Summary

In this article, I've been able to discuss all the talking points listed in the introduction.

I described the app and explained a little bit extensively how the app works.
Furthermore, I also talked about other things; Why it is important to watch our calorie intake and if this tracking works.

Like the concept of activity tracking, expense, and income tracking, this one is also very important.

In case you joked with the kind of foods or meals you take, I advise you start watching it now.

This app will help you stay on point, you should try it out.

In my next article on this series, I will be reviewing the features of the app.

Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading.

Links

Project repository: https://github.com/davidhealey/waistline

App download link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.waist.line

Resources:

• Does calorie counting work?
• 5 REASONS YOU NEED TO COUNT CALORIES

Some points in this article were picked off that source. Other than that;

The content of this post is based on my knowledge of the project and mostly from my experience. The images used are screenshots of the app on my device. Other images gotten elsewhere have their source links provided just below them.

Series backlinks:

• Simple mobile apps to help you manage your activities, resources, and health. Part 1
• Simple mobile apps to help you manage your activities, resources, and health.(Part 1 contd.)
• Simple mobile apps to help you manage your activities, resources, and health.(Part 1 contd.)
• Simple mobile apps to help you manage your activities, resources, and health.(Part 2)
• Simple mobile apps to help you manage your activities, resources, and health.(Part 2)
• Simple mobile apps to help you manage your activities, resources, and health.(Part 3)
• Simple mobile apps to help you manage your activities, resources, and health.(Part 3 contd)

Github profile:

https://github.com/HarryHeights