The start of the new year is often the perfect time to turn a new page in your life. The top New Year’s resolution for most people is to lose weight and eat healthy. Now there is an app that can help the Penn State community stay on track to a healthier lifestyle.
The Undressed Foods app is a wellness program that is nutrition-focused, customized to the user, and helps track caloric, fat, protein, alcohol, and caffeine intake of meal choices at on-campus as well as off-campus eateries in the Penn State community.
For more than a year, founder Jennifer Swistock has gathered the data, and with the help of Rowland Creative and West Arete in State College, the Undressed Foods app launched in December 2015. It is a free app with a premium upgrade and is available for download through undressedfoods.com.
Swistock used her background in the food industry and her experience as a chef from owning a catering business to gather all the nutritional information.
“I made friends with a lot of the chefs and general managers of the restaurants to get exact recipes for the dishes,” she says. “With a lot of the dishes, I would go to the restaurant and order it a few times and then get it to go so I could go home, dissect it, weigh all the components, and make very well-educated guesstimates on the nutritional information.”
How the app works is, as the user, you select if you are looking to lose weight or to maintain your weight, and based on your age, weight, height, activity level, and goal, the app tracks your calorie intake. As you dine on-campus or off-campus, you can search in the alphabetic list of restaurants and view the suggested meals with nutritional information.
The app also indicates what meals at your chosen restaurant are healthy options. As of December, there were 77 off-campus restaurants with nutritional information available on the app. The on-campus portion of the app includes all dining halls, HUB eateries, Pegula Ice Arena, and Beaver Stadium concessions.
In addition, there also are general guides to help users with food choices when they are not dining at a restaurant. In the general guides, there are sections for eating at a tailgate, amusement park, in your dorm, at home, and out of town.
“It’s broken up into ethnic cuisine like Greek or Indian,” Swistock says. “It also includes recipes for meals to make at home as well as cocktails with caloric intake and alcohol units.”
For more information, visit undressedfood.com.
