Welcome to our guide to losing weight with the Apple Watch. We discuss the best apps to install on your watch (and how best to use the device's excellent preinstalled apps as part of a fitness regime), and offer some tips that will help you shed pounds in a safe and healthy way. Read next: Apple Watch and fitness: A couch potato's perspective

Monitor your water intake

A regular intake of water will rapidly improve your skin, flush toxins and take the edge of your appetite. Sometimes when you think you're hungry you're actually thirsty. Just taking water alone is a huge step in improving your health.

I use WaterMinder to regulate and promote regular daily water intake; this has an Apple Watch version that nudges you to drink at regular intervals.

Control your calorie intake

Controlling calorie intake is far easier than worrying about nutrition levels. Get calorie intake under control first and worry about balancing out your nutrition when you've reached the point where calorie intake is under control.

If you want to lose weight, calorie control is far more important than exercise. Plus, exercise will be easier once the weight is off. Don't expect to lose loads of weight through exercise alone, as exercise will also drive you to consume more calories to replace expended energy. Control your calories to lose weight and understand that exercise is there to help you strengthen your body, muscles, heart and lungs.

I recommend MyFitnessPal to control calories and nutrition. But we have lots more recommendations for apps that can help with your diet here: Best weight-loss apps for iPhone & iPad

Step counting and exercise

Motion 24/7 is a good sleep tracker and step counter for the iPhone, but the second part of that equation was quickly taken over by the Apple Watch when it arrived. (We recommend a bunch more options here: Best workout apps for iPhone.)

Filling my rings on the Apple Watch each day has become a natural part of my day. My Activity ring is now set to challenge me to burn 600 active calories per day. That's literally double what it was the day I got my Watch.

As of writing this, I've closed all three circles every day without fail for 732 days in a row. Read next: Fitness trackers that work with Apple's Health app

The Apple Watch has two preinstalled apps that help you with exercise: Activity (which covers all of your day-to-day movements, motivating you to fill in the rings illustrated above) and Workout (which deals with dedicated cardio exercise sessions, offering separate workouts for running, cycling, swimming and so on). Read next: How to get every Activity achievement badge on Apple Watch

Bear in mind that while the Apple Watch Series 2 has GPS and can therefore provide accurate measurements when you run, the first-gen and Series 1 models do not. They will piggyback on the GPS of an associated iPhone if it's close enough, but otherwise they have to guess the distance based on your number of steps and the information they have about your stride length.

Each time you 'train' the watch by taking it out running with an iPhone, it gets a bit smarter at guessing distances when the iPhone's not there, so it's worth putting in a bit of time to help it learn about your running style. Read more about this process here: How to make the Apple Watch a more accurate fitness tracker.

Finally, consider picking up some wireless headphones so you can listen to music directly from your watch while out running. We've got plenty of recommendations in our Best wireless headphones and Best running & fitness headphones roundup articles.

Heart monitoring

To the Watch, I've added HeartWatch which acts as a superbly detailed heart monitor and sleep monitor. It will warn you if your heartbeat gets too high or too low and enables you to follow trends so you'll get early warning of any potential heart problems long before anything bad happens.

There are documented stories of how this app has literally saved lives.

Case study: Losing 50 pounds with an Apple Watch

With health becoming the next growth sector for technology, I decided to carry out an experiment on myself to see if apps and devices really could help me. I'd been 18 stone for far too long and at the age of 45 I could feel that weight starting to affect my joints and bones.

Knowing the Apple Watch was on the horizon (this was a couple of years ago), and reasoning it was going to be a health wearable, I set about curating some useful apps for my iPhone in preparation. After much experimentation, I settled on WaterMinder, MyFitnessPal and Motion 24/7.

Over the course of my journey (2.5 years) I've lost 50lbs (3.5 stone) and kept it off. You lose weight not by dieting but by changing your diet, and that's what apps and devices enable you to do.

To mark a year of having my Apple Watch, and having regained health and happiness, I sent Tim Cook himself an email as I'd heard he actually does read customer emails just as Steve Jobs used to.

I wasn't really expecting a reply but I just wanted him to know that the device he's championed really can change lives. He was kind enough to send me an email back that day congratulating me for my achievement. Read next: Use Apple's Health app to get fit and healthy