Are you eating enough protein? Muscle Gainer ($3.99) is an iPhone/iPod touch application that lets you get disciplined with your every carbohydrate and protein food intake. It’s a cool application that does a lot of great things. First, choose your food. You can query the database of foods within the application or you can input your food yourself. Thankfully, most of pre-packaged food has Nutrition Info labels, because you’ll need this to input the values (number of calories, amount of fat, amount of carbs, etc.) in the screen. Then, tell the program how much you’ve eaten. Was it one serving? Two? Your intake will be featured on a screen and you’ll need to eat enough proteins so that you build up muscle. That’s the secret. Not too difficult. :)
The application also charts your weight in a graph and protein intake as well in a similarly featured graph. Additionally, you can export the data too.
The application boasts 30,000 common food items. Personally, I ran into a little trouble here, especially with some more common foods (Lactaid milk comes in varieties, but I believe the database only has one such Lactaid variation), but there really are lots and lots of food items (try typing “corn” and you’ll see). Additionally, to be fair, there are 40,000 restaurant menu items from 404 restaurants as well in the app. While I typically don’t eat restaurant food, it’s good to know that they are thinking of those who prefer prepared meals (since well, I do too!). But I’d love to see a community-contributed database of some sort so that I can pull data from the database (so that I wouldn’t have had to run into issues when getting data for my Lactaid milk intake). If not, it’d be cool to consider more foods as I’m definitely running into this issue often.
Despite this shortcoming, this app is exhaustive with features, and if you’re a fitness buff who wants to keep track of your food intake, especially to grow some muscle, this is a must-have application that really does give you a run for your money.
