The Centers for Desease Control and Prevention says that one out of three adults in the USA is fat. I have to admit, I’ve got more than a few pounds I wouldn’t miss. Since I’m a geek, how can I use my Android-powered smartphone to help me shed those pounds — and keep them off?

There are really three factors to why a person weighs what they do: caloric intake, calories burned, and genetics.

You may not know it, but a “calorie” is a unit of energy, specifically it’s an amount of heat equal to 4.1840 joules. Given that context, the number of calories that you intake (eat) must equal the number of calories that you burn to maintain your weight. While it may be an over-simplification, if you take in more calories than you burn you’ll gain eight, any less and you’ll lose weight.

Since you can’t change your genes (yet?), we’ll focus on one of the the latter two. You can either take in less calories, or burn more than you take in. For this article, let’s talk about burning more calories.

Weight and Body Mass are the two most common ways of measuring how fat (or not fat) you are. Before we get started we’re going to need a way to track our progress.

Weight Journal is very simple-to-use app for tracking your weight and calculating your BMI. It comes highly rated, and lets you focus on your progress. There are several other apps out there, so look around and find one that works for you, but make sure you get one so you can see if you’re improving — or getting worse.

Now that we’ve got a way to track our progress, we need some tools to help us burn calories, and replace fat with muscle.

Garmin Fit is made by the same people who are famous for their GPS products. As you might have guessed, this app helps you keep track of how much running or walking you do based on your geolocation, and helps build your endurance and motivates you to get moving!

To build muscle most of us think of sit-ups and push-ups. They’re relatively easy to do and they don’t require any extra equipment like weights or home-gyms.

Two Hundred Situps and Hundred Pushups are apps that help you gauge your current ability, then build up strength so you can do two-hundred sit-ups and one hundred push-ups. In the process they help you build upper-body strength, as well as strengthening your torso and back.

True, it’s not time for New Year’s Resolutions, but we forget about those too quickly anyway. Instead, let’s get into healthy habits before the holiday season starts thickening our mid-sections. Are you with me?