Tesco Healthy Living Tracker > Reviews (1)

WHAT IS IT?

This product is a free web-based programme that tracks the calorific and nutritional content of your food for you.

A couple of years ago I used weightwatchers on line, which is the same idea, but there is a subscription payable for that after the free trial period, of (when I did it) £9.99 a month.

Having had another baby and gained a stone, and it being January, I felt the urge to lose weight and I saw an ad for this new Tesco's tracker and thought I'd give it a go. I lost a stone with the Weightwatchers programme, so was happy to give this one a go, all the more, since it is a free programme.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Basically you start by signing up, which only takes a few minutes, and you give it your height, weight and, if you want to, your waist measurement. You then tell it how active you are in your daily life, and whether you are looking to lose weight , or just eat more healthily and maintain your current weight. It then calculates a points total of food you can have per day.

It automatically produces a graph with your weight loss on it and a daily summary which tells you:

a) how many calories you've consumed
b) how much salt, fat and sugar etc is in your diet

It also tells you your BMI.

It worksall that out by you inputting all the foods you have eaten, and telling it what exercise you have taken that day. It includes things like housework and walking, so your everyday activities get taken into consideration as well specific exercise like swimming.

So it helps you control your food intake and so lose weight, by providing you with the information you need to eat well.

HOW GOOD IS IT?

Well to be honest not as good as the Weightwatchers one, as it does not have the wide range of food in its database that weightwatchers does, for you to pick from, so sometimes you have to find the nearest equivalent item.

Good points:

1. It is free

2. It does work, as it stops you lying to yourself

3. You can put in your everyday items as recurring, which means you don't have to type in the same thing everyday if, for example, you always eat Shreddies for breakfast them walk half a mile.

4. It is not restricted to Tescos products - it has a range of things from different supermarkets.

5. It is not just calorie counting but helps you ensure you are getting enough fibre, and not too much saturated fat etc.

Bad points:

1. It can be a fiddly and time consuming to enter all your foods

2. It keeps a running total of points through the week, but gives you credit for days you haven't had yet, so your points total is always in credit as on Wednesday you have not eaten anything on Thursday or Friday yet. You can manually alter your daily totals to zero before the day, then put it back again, but that's a faff.

3. It doesn't have every food you ever eat. It is especially incomplete on home made food. There is a section on recipes where you can input the ingredients of a dish though, then the next time you just click on it.

4. You have to watch the portion sizes - it suggest an amount, but it is sometimes wildly wrong for what you actually eat.

For example the portion size for a stock cube was a 12 pack of stock cubes, which you would never eat yourself all at once! You can alter the number of grams in the portion size easily - so you just have to watch for this feature.

5. It works on a points system , which is great, but uses different values to Weightwatchers so if you are used to them, you'll have to adjust. For example a glass of wine under the Tescos scheme is worth 3 points, and a small glass in Weightwatchers is only worth 1.

6. When you search for a food in the search engine, it often tells you the food is not listed even though it is there. e.g. type in semi-skimmed milk and it says no products found, but type in milk and scroll to the second page and semi-skimmed milk is, in fact, there.

Overall I'd say this is a great free product and I'm certainly not going to pay more to use thee weightwatchers one, even though it's better. I've lost 6 pounds already! - in two weeks.

Summary: Great free addition to products designed to help you lose weight.