Wink by Amanda Salis

Wink by Amanda Salis helps you lose weight by listening to your body signals of hunger and satisfaction.

The app helps you recognize when you feel comfortably hungry, and coaches you to eat only when you feel comfortably hungry. It also helps you recognize when you feel comfortably full, and coaches you to stop eating when you feel comfortably full.

When you eat this way, and combine it with mostly healthy foods and regular physical activity, your body can reach its optimum weight – without you having to count calories or kilojoules, eliminate your favorite foods, or weigh or measure everything you eat.

To help you eat mostly healthy foods, the wink app coaches you to eat daily doses of vegetables and fruits in quantities that are scientifically proven to promote weight loss and deliver optimized nutrition. Vegetables and fruits are the only foods you need to weigh or measure while using the Wink by Amanda Salis app – to help ensure you’re eating enough of them.

To help you be physically active, the wink app holds your hand as you gradually build up to the types and amounts of physical activity that science has proven to promote permanent weight loss and optimum health. The app recommends that you start by counting your incidental activity (‘active energy’), such as housework and other activities of daily living, then add aerobic activity (‘exercise minutes’), then muscle strengthening exercise. All three of these types of physical activity have proven benefits for weight management and health.

You can set your targets for the three different types of physical activity in the settings, and you can adjust your targets to your preferences. There are two ways to track your physical activity in the Wink app: automatically and manually. You can use both automatic and manual tracking if you like. To track your physical activity automatically, use any physical activity tracker that writes data to the Health app (active energy and exercise minutes). To track your physical activity manually, simply select its’ intensity and duration, and whether it included muscle strengthening exercise. Note that muscle strengthening exercise must be tracked manually.

The app gives you instant and intuitive color-based and shape-based feedback on what to do and what not to do. The colors are color-blind safe (except for full monochromacy, but the shape-based feedback can be seen with any type of color-blindness).

The app also gives you retrospective feedback on how you've been going in the week so far: what you're doing well; and what you could change to optimize weight management. The weekly wrap makes you aware of the patterns in any eating pitfalls you may have, a first step in overcoming them. For example, you may notice that the only time you eat when you're not hungry is when you're working after dinner at the kitchen table, so this is an opportunity to address it.

The wink app sends you notifications to remind you to enter your eating events throughout the day. These notifications can be personalized in the settings.

The in-built weight tracker in the wink app helps you keep track of your weight loss progress. The weight graph shows color-coded feedback on your eating and physical activity for each day, so you can see how the way you eat and move influences your weight.