Locally made fitness app chooses food portions
A new app is turning the weightloss process on its head.
Mark DiFruscio of St. Catharines has developed the fitness app Calorie Wiz, which calculates the amount of food users can eat in order to meet their weight goals.
DiFruscio says his app is unique because it tells users how much to eat, whereas other fitness apps count calories already consumed.
He says he was inspired to create the app five or six years ago after he lost 22.5 kilograms (50 pounds). At first, he says he thought the only way to lose weight was by eating healthy foods, but after hearing about the Twinkie Diet — a study done by a professor who lost weight by limiting his calories, but eating only junk food — he began using a calorie counter.
“I didn’t really restrict my diet. If I wanted a cookie, I would eat a cookie, and I still lost weight,” DiFruscio says.
However, he says this strategy didn’t work for many people he recommended it to because they found counting calories too timeconsuming or complicated.
“That’s where I kind of sparked the idea and I started to write the business plan … what if we could help users and people who are struggling to lose weight by giving them a product that does the counting (of calories) for them?”
Users start by entering their age, sex, height, activity level, weight and goal weight — whether that be to gain, maintain or lose weight, DiFruscio says.
“(The app) goes one step further, in that the user now has the ability to set how many calories they want to eat per meal, and how many meals they want to have per day,” he says.
Users can then enter in what food (or foods) they want to eat for a given meal, and the app will tell them how exactly much of that food they can eat to fill their calorie settings for that meal, he says.
“There’s no longer that pain of sitting there, trying to determine how much, and what you can eat, and what you cannot eat,” he says. “The app is simply going to tell you the portions you can have in order to hit your goals.”
DiFruscio says he partnered with a developer in Washington who created a database of more than 750,000 foods.
He says Calorie Wiz doesn’t allow users to enter food options into the database, unlike other calorie counter apps, so the system doesn’t become clogged with options.
This reduces the time it takes to enter in food, he says.
“There’s no duplicates. It’s verified, it’s been worked on for a very long time.”
However, he says users still have the option of searching for specific brands or inputting their food by scanning the product bar codes, if they wish.
The app was launched at the end of November. DiFruscio says he used the first month to fix any bugs, before releasing the first update at the end of December.
He plans to use the month of January to market the app.
“Just getting the app launched was a very big step forward for us and a big success, and now it’ll be fun to basically initiate our marketing plan and watch, hopefully, a steady but rapid growth in the new year,” he says.
DiFruscio says he plans to market the app using before and after weight-loss photos, as well as advertising through fitness bloggers on Instagram and YouTube.
Calorie Wiz is available for about $4 at the Apple Store. Users receive a 14-day free trial.
More information can be found at www.caloriewizapp.com.