The COVID pandemic has seen almost half of adults put on weight. If you want to get healthier, lose fat, and get fitter, don’t do it alone—there are free weight loss apps available from the NHS, such as diet apps and plans that can help. These free apps can help you introduce small changes, helping you both eat better and get more active.
The NHS Weight Loss Plan app has helped many people like you lose up to a stone in three months.
The pandemic not only closed gyms and forced people into their homes, it led to an epidemic of comfort eating. Being overweight raises your risk of dying of COVID-19, on top of being linked to diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and other illnesses.
These free apps are an excellent place to start a healthy diet and exercise programme. This programme gently ramps up and leads to slow, sustainable, healthy weight loss by increasing your exercise and eating habits.
- NHS Weight Loss Plan – lose up to 6Kg [around a stone] over 12 weeks for free
- NHS Change 4 Life Food Scanner – helps you make healthier meal choices
- NHS Couch to 5k App – helps almost anyone start running gently
Kickstart your weight loss with this free NHS Diet App
Users of this Weight Loss Plan [who kept going over 12 weeks] reported a loss on average of almost a stone (5.8kg), according to research published by Public Health England (PHE). The app, which also comes in downloadable PDFs, has weekly targets to keep you motivated. The plan is broken down into 12 weeks so you can:
- set weight loss goals
- use the BMI calculator to customise your plan
- plan your meals
- make healthier food choices, count calories
- get more active and burn more calories
- record your activity and progress
The NHS says that the average person should reduce their daily calorie intake by 600 to lose weight safely. Women should aim for 1,400 calories each day, and men 1,900. But everyone is different; you can change this to a person’s amount using the BMI calculator.
Here are some reviews of it on Google Play:
Change4Life Food Scanner
This simple NHS app reveals just how high in salt and sugar some of your favourite foods are. And it can come as a shock when some of the foods you thought were healthy turn out not to be.
All you need to do is scan the barcode of a product, such as a can of soup, cereal, jam, or pasta, and the app will visually show how many sugar cubes or salt sachets are inside a serving.
It displays each item’s “traffic lights” for sugar, saturated fat and salt, with low, medium and high.
Over the following months, it plans to show alternatives for the items you scan, making better choices even easier to make as you shop. For now, it’s a useful tool to see what items in your cupboard are silently adding to your waistline.
Free NHS Exercise App – Couch to 5K
Running is known to be one of the best exercises for blitzing body fat – and the C25K app gets people who have never run before off the sofa and burning calories. It incorporates a mixture of running and walking and, if followed correctly, should allow beginners to run 5,000m in just nine weeks.
Couch to 5K users have a choice of five trainers to support them, including BBC presenter Jo Whiley, Olympian Michael Johnson, and comedienne Sarah Millican. The app will track and award your progress as you complete the workouts and give you tips for future workouts.
On top of this, it’s free to download and use.
Have you considered digital bathroom scales to help you on your weight-loss journey?
