Lose It! has been around since 2008, it is cheaper than MyFitnessPal (about $39.99/yr versus roughly $79.99), and unlike MyFitnessPal it does not paywall the barcode scanner. As a straightforward calorie counter, it is honest value and there is nothing wrong with it.
The problem is right there in the name.
The framing problem
Lose It! is built to make one number go down: your bodyweight. Every design decision follows from that — the goal-setting, the daily budget, the progress screens.
But the scale cannot distinguish muscle from fat, and if you lift, that distinction is the entire point. Consider two people who both lose 4 kg over twelve weeks:
- Person A lost 4 kg of fat and kept all their muscle. They look dramatically better and are just as strong.
- Person B lost 2.5 kg of fat and 1.5 kg of muscle. They look softer at a lower bodyweight and their lifts have all dropped.
Lose It! congratulates both of them identically. It cannot tell them apart, because it only ever sees one number — and the one variable that most determines which outcome you get (whether you kept training heavy, and whether your volume matched your recovery capacity in the deficit) is invisible to it.
Where Lose It! wins
- Price. The cheapest mainstream premium tier in the category.
- Free barcode scanning, which its bigger rival charges for.
- Simplicity. If your goal genuinely is just weight loss and you do not lift, it does the job without fuss.
- "Snap It" photo logging identifies multiple foods in one image.
Where it stops
No strength log
Exercise is calorie burn, synced from a wearable. No sets, no reps, no loads, no progression. Your training is a number of calories, not a stimulus.
No connection between what you eat and what you lift
Which means the app cannot see the most common failure mode in the whole of fitness: losing weight while quietly losing muscle, because you cut hard, trained hard, and nothing in your stack was watching the interaction. Your top sets fall; the app shows a green streak; the scale is "working." This is what happens when nothing reads both signals.
Where Gymrock is different
Gymrock is not built around the scale. It is built around the interaction between what you ate and what you lifted — because that interaction is what determines whether the weight you lose is fat or muscle.
One model reads your meals, your logged sets and RPE, and your recovery signals. Every Monday at 7 a.m. it makes one call — push, hold, or pull back — and shows the math. If your loads are regressing while your weight drops, that is the alarm that matters, and it is the one a scale-first app is structurally unable to raise.
Core features are free, so it is also not a price trade.
Which should you pick?
| If you… | Pick |
|---|---|
| Just want to lose weight and do not lift | Lose It! — cheap and effective |
| Want the lowest-cost paid calorie counter | Lose It! |
| Lift, and want to keep the muscle while you cut | Gymrock |
| Care about body composition, not scale weight | Gymrock |
| Want food and training in one model | Gymrock |