Your health: New app shows what you would look like post-weight loss

App shows you post-weight loss

Do you ever picture yourself a few pounds slimmer?

Thanks to new app Visualize You, users can now better visualize their post-weight loss bodies even before hitting the gym, PEOPLE magazine reports.

The app allows users to transform an old photo and generate a realistic depiction of their bodies at a new target weight.

The app was developed by Visual Health Solutions, in collaboration with the Wellness Institute at Cleveland Clinic, the University of Colorado Anschutz Health and Wellness Center and UnitedHealthcare, as a method of motivating weight loss by creating a visual cue.

So how does it work?

The app first instructs the user to enter a height and weight and upload a “before” photo.

The program then uses a 3-D model engine and various algorithms developed by weight loss experts to digitally alter the photo to generate a realistic “after” image that shows the user at whichever goal weight he or she selects, according to the official website. Users can also share their before-and-after photos on social media.

Visualize You is also intended to more accurately represent the actual effects of weight change, compared to other basic editing apps that use simple photo shop methods to tweak pictures.

“People are looking for an effective way to motivate themselves and their friends to embark on a formal healthy weight program,” Paul Baker, CEO of Visual Health Solutions, tells PEOPLE.

And the app already received a stamp of approval from a weight loss expert.

“I will often recommend that people put up pictures of what they want to look like or what they used to look like, provided the body image is healthy,” weight loss specialist Charlie Seltzer, M.D., told Yahoo! Health.

Orange glasses may help you sleep

Most evenings, before watching late-night comedy or reading emails on his phone, Matt Nicoletti puts on a pair of orange-colored glasses that he bought for $8 off the Internet.

“My girlfriend thinks I look ridiculous in them,” he said. But Mr. Nicoletti, a 30-year-old hospitality consultant in Denver, insists that the glasses, which can block certain wavelengths of light emitted by electronic screens, make it easier to sleep, The New York Times reports.

Studies have shown that such light, especially from the blue part of the spectrum, inhibits the body's production of melatonin, a hormone that helps people fall asleep. Options are growing for blocking blue light, though experts caution that few have been adequately tested for effectiveness and the best solution remains avoiding brightly lit electronics at night.

A Swiss study of 13 teenage boys, published in August in The Journal of Adolescent Health, showed that when the boys donned orange-tinted glasses, also known as blue blockers and shown to prevent melatonin suppression, in the evening for a week, they felt “significantly more sleepy” than when they wore clear glasses. The boys looked at their screens, as teenagers tend to do, for at least a few hours on average before going to bed, and were monitored in the lab.

Older adults may be less affected by blue light, experts say, since the yellowing of the lens and other changes in the aging eye filter out increasing amounts of blue light.

But blue light remains a problem for most people, and an earlier study of 20 adults ages 18 to 68 found that those who wore amber-tinted glasses for three hours before bed improved their sleep quality considerably relative to a control group that wore yellow-tinted lenses, which blocked only ultraviolet light.