I had really lost faith in losing weight until I found this app. I have lost 1 stone and 8 pounds since last April which sounds like a long time and it is but tracking the food I eat has been the only way to reflect daily on why I have eaten in order to change my eating habits. I am still technically obese but moving in the right direction. I feel like I’m in control and if I don’t reach my target I just start the 12 week programme again. I used to avoid thinking about what I’d really eaten over the day and never weigh myself! Now I do this weekly I can reassure myself that it’s easy to get back on track rather than telling myself it’s all gone wrong after a week of being less careful or over Christmas etc. the app has great advice that if you really reflect on and follow you will do it. I’m on my fourth programme now and I can now get into my some trousers I never thought would be possible again! People have told me I look great. Slow and steady is the best way to relearn how to eat healthily and to reflect on your relationship with food. I put a reminder on my phone every day at 7pm to update what I’ve eaten and it takes 5 minutes once you’ve got all your favourites recorded. Thanks NHS app!

The only improvements I would make would be to have one favourites list rather than a list for each meal as often I might have something for dinner one day that I had as lunch the day before and so I find I have to keep going back to check how many grams and calories something was so that I can add the information to a new meal. I would also like the favourites list to list things alphabetically as when you have been on the diet plan a few weeks the favourites lists get quite long and the longer they get the harder it is to find what you were looking for. It would also be brilliant if it calculated how many calories something was if the weight of the item was different than that listed as this can be time consuming to do manually hence my long favourites list ! I team this app with a steps app which measures how far I have walked how many steps I’ve taken and how many calories I’ve burnt with daily weekly and monthly trends. The 2 apps together work really well and after only 3 weeks I’ve already lost 8lbs and 4.5ins off my waist. There are lots of useful tips on the app as well. I tend to plan around 3 days meals in advance and then add snacks and drinks to make up the calories opting mainly for fruit snacks and carrot or celery sticks which I can graze on whenever and I prepare all the snacks for the day each morning so that I am less tempted to grab something less healthy from the cupboard if I start to get peckish but actually my body very quickly adapted to eating less and now I rarely feel hungry. All in all I am very pleased with the app and also my progress.

I am incredibly pleased with this App. It is full of useful information and a calorie counter/weight loss record. Well done to the NHS- I can’t believe this is free! I wish I had looked to the health service years ago to help me with my weight loss but for some reason it didn’t occur to me. Too busy paying to lose weight to see what was under my nose, I guess. I have found this app very easy to use and such a simple and sensible way to lose weight. I have tried other systems that worked for me in the past but I have not been able to get into them again. Diet fatigue! This is great. Rather than worrying about what I can have for my lunch if I am out and trying to calculate how it fits into the diet system, I just check the calories on the label, buy a sandwich (from a shop), log the calories and it knocks them off my daily total. Sounds obvious but recording what I have had in the day has had such a positive effect on my eating habits. I have been cooking some chilli for later in the week and had to do some calculations to work out how many calories is in it but I can live with that- especially as the App showed me I had only had about 1000 calories after I had eaten my evening meal so I could have a small piece of cake and a cup of tea- and still have had less calories than my body needs. The diets that I have tried in the past have certain foods that you can eat as much as you want of. For me, the concept of eating as much as I like of anything is not a good idea. I have had to accept that reducing the number of calories that go in my mouth is the only way I am going to lose weight. Thank you NHS.

The app is fine if a little on the basic side. I like that is doesn’t ask you to other think weight-loss as a lot of the more complicated apps do. My one issue is that the app has an over simplistic and slightly dangerous mindset of ‘weight loss = good, weight gain = bad’. For the first 3 weeks I was using the app I lost weight through healthy eating and exercise which the app responded well to. However, when I gained muscle, the app merely saw this as a bad thing when really it’s just an indicator that I’ve formed a healthy diet + exercise routine. The app gives you an option each day to input any exercise you’ve done and the time you did it for but it has no bearing on the overall experience whatsoever, as the data is not taken into account at all so the feature might as well not be there. If it took time spent on exercise during the week into account, I think the app would understand that I’m not gaining ‘unhealthy’ weight (fat) but ‘healthy’ weight (muscle), and creating a much healthier lifestyle for myself which is ultimately supposed to be the whole purpose of the app. I think this is especially important as this app is attached to the NHS. No doctor would view a patient gaining muscle as a result of physical exercise and good diet as a bad thing- in fact it would be the exact opposite- so it’s a big flaw in the app that it’s oversimplified design causes it to do exactly that.