Why I built Fazon

Losing weight is, in one way, very simple, and in another, very hard. The simple part is that you eat fewer calories than you burn. Most people know that. The hard part is sticking to it, week after week, in a life that doesn’t stop for it. I built Fazon for the hard part.

Up and down

I have been overweight for most of my life, and my weight has gone up and down over the years. Along the way I’ve tried several food tracking apps: MyFitnessPal, FatSecret, Lifesum, Lose It!. They work well. But I never used them the way they are built to be used.

What worked for me was a few weeks with a strict calorie target, then a period where the focus was keeping my weight where it was, then a few strict weeks again. That fits around a regular life: holidays, the festive season, the weeks when something else has to come first.

A phase, with an end

That pattern is what Fazon is built around, and it is where the name comes from. When you give a few weeks to it, you are on a phase.

An Active Phase is 4, 8 or 12 weeks. During it you keep more strictly to your calorie target, without starving yourself. Between phases you still keep track, but the goal is to hold your new weight, not to lose more. That is much easier to combine with everything else.

There is a psychological side to it as well. When I know the phase ends in five weeks, it is easier to say no to the tasty, calorie-heavy treat. It isn’t no forever. It’s no for now.

It isn’t no forever. It’s no for now.

Calories and protein, and nothing more on Today

I also wanted it to be simple. Fazon keeps every nutrient the food database has, and they are all in the export, but Today shows two things: your calories against your target, and your protein.

Protein is there so that your body keeps its muscle while it loses fat. That matters more than whether the rest of your calories come from carbohydrates or fat.

Keep the muscle

Muscle matters a lot. I go to the gym twice a week, and I would recommend strength training to anyone who is losing weight, so that what you lose is fat and not muscle. The research points the same way: a review found that enough protein and regular exercise, both endurance and strength training, help preserve muscle during weight loss (Cava and others, 2017).

Fazon doesn’t track the gym. That is a whole app of its own.

And walk

The gym doesn’t suit everyone. Most people can go for a walk, though, and walking is real exercise.

That is the other half of what Fazon tracks: what you burn. It looks at how much you walk now and sets a step target a little above it.

So that is Fazon: a few focused weeks at a time, calories and protein in view, a walk most days, and quiet in between. I use it myself, one phase at a time.