Channeling my inner grocery cashier.

A belated happy holidays, readers! I know that you are all eagerly anticipating my "2011: year in review" post. One of the bigger events of my 2011- starting a new job- has taken a major chunk of out my blogging time. Fear not, though- I promise to get it done before 2012!

In the meantime, I want to take a minute to tell you about a cool new app from Weight Watchers: the "WW Scanner" app. This app is free and available for Android and Iphone (and maybe some other smartphones too), but you have to be a WW online or E-tools subscriber in order to use it.  It turns your phone into a barcode scanner for grocery items. You pick up something in your grocery store or pantry, use your phone's camera to scan the barcode, and then the app calculates the WW points for that item. Then, you can save the item to a list of favorites, or zap the points total right into your daily tracker (on the website or the WW Mobile app). Amazing!

I downloaded this app a couple nights ago and then spent a good half-hour going through my refrigerator and pantry zapping things. The app did not recognize about 25% of the items I scanned, but I imagine that it will get better over time. Even with a 25% failure rate, this app still has the potential to save serious time. Calculating the Points for a new food can happen in a second, and the process of putting that food in your tracker is faster too. Just one or two clicks and you're done. (Of course, you still have to pay attention to the serving size of the food to avoid low-or-highballing the points.)

I am excited about this app because tracking has always been the key to my success or failure on Weight Watchers. When I track, I lose or maintain. When I don't track, I gain. Case in point: I tracked religiously last winter and lost close to 15 pounds. Then, over the summer, I stopped tracking and gained it all back. My reasons for not tracking are always the same: I'm busy and it feels like too much work. Fortunately, the combo of the old WW Mobile app and the new WW Scanner app elminate a lot of the effort involved in tracking. So long, excuses!