MOVE! Coach

Just like every other federal government app this one is overbuilt and modified over a foundation of basic missions. I find this app to be very helpful in losing weight, increasing stamina, balance, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. But! I’ve had to be flexible and adapt my info inputs to the basic app framework. Once I adapted and adjusted my input on the fly, the app exactly what I wanted it to be. At this point I confess that I worked as a Chef for 35 years so the dietary section of this app holds no mystery for me. I was very health conscious in my youth, keeping fit with stretching, and weight training programs that I still adhere to. I played a LOT of beer league softball and still bike my way back and forth to appointments. The physical work and calorie burn rates are no mystery to me either. Using the rest of this app successfully requires a little ingenuity and a LOT of common sense. I have completed the majority of the MOVE! Sections and have restarted them twice now. Doing so authorizes my use of VA physical therapy exercise facilities to maintain and improve my physical well being. I turned 70 this year and using this app may help me make 80+ a healthy possiblity. So quit complaining, stop seeing everything in black and white, use your intellect with cleverness, and mold this app to fit your needs and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how helpful and easy it is to use.

This is a good app, but there is room for improvement. First, there is no way to change the date of what you are trying to enter. When i was entering my meals from yesterday it put them on today because it was after midnight when i finished inputting the data. Second, the exercise calorie count is very generic. I have a treadmill that does incline up to 11 degrees and that drastically changes the calories burned during the workout. There is also no way to set how fast you were going. In 30 minutes of walking at 5.5 km/h on a 7 degree incline i burned 196 calories with a distance of 2.74km. This app only gave me credit for around 130 calories. And third when choosing what our meals are it would be helpful if we could select what items were used. For instance my meal last night was spaghetti macaroni with lean ground pork. I also sprinkled some parmesan cheese on it. But there is no way that i see to edit the entry. I’ll give this app a 3 star for now. If you upgrade the app and make it better I”ll revisit my review.

Over the last year I have lost 30 lbs and I owe that to this app. I have struggled with my weight for more than a decade, never being able to drop weight, but when I started using this app to track calories and my weight I started seeing progress. The app definitely has its flaws and plenty of room for improvement, but it ended up being the little bit extra I needed to get me shedding weight. Problems/areas of improvement: - Search function for meal tracker is not very good. It takes a bit of time to figure out the regional name for some foods and there are also many foods not included. I started finding something close in description, with higher calories, and putting that in the diet log. A QR scanner would be a nice improvement to remedy this. - Activity tracker was not very useful for me. I ended up using the iPhone app instead. This may be because I was already familiar with that app.