Are you a fitness enthusiast? Or have you just started dieting? No matter what the reason may be, there are plenty of ways how technology can help us. Tracking the food that you consume, and the calorie intake is an extremely important part of it. Research tells us that those who tend to dedicatedly note down their calorie intake usually lose more weight. They are also more likely to maintain their goal weight.
With many reliable diet tracker apps, counting calories is no longer a stressful task. You would be able to track your intake and log your meals easily. Let’s take a look at the top 5 diet tracker apps. Most of them are available for iOS and Android as well. You will have to create an account in order to use them but the registration process takes less than a minute. The best part is that every app on this list is free for use.
- Carb Manager
Carb Manager is designed to help the user stay on the path with their keto diet. Its database contains over a million food, so you are more than likely to come across everything you need. The app also offers as many as 350,000 low-carb recipes. You will also be able to track your body, weight, exercises, calorie counts, and measurements. While the basic app is free, its premium version comes at a cost. As soon as you set your goal, the carb counter starts counting the carbs you consume. Its meal-planning feature helps plan ahead so that you never get tempted to veer off the course.
Carb Manager takes into consideration your body statistics before creating a customized plan. It is not easy to start off with a strict diet and the makers of the app know it, which is why you will be able to slowly ease into it. With their Carb Counter feature, you will be able to upload pictures of food items, scan barcodes, or search for goods. It will then bring you information about its contents and nutritional value.
- MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal is a popular name in the fitness community. The app has over a million active users thanks to its reliable operations. It works not only to track your weight and food intake but also calculates the recommended daily calorie intake. The app has a food diary and an exercise log that you can use to enter and track your daily activities. The homepage is quite user-friendly and shows you how much you have consumed for that day along with the recommended intake of carbs, fat, and so on.
Another nice feature of MyFitnessPal is that it can sync with most fitness tracking device and add that data to your exercise log, making it easier for you to track your progress. You can also make use of their chat forum where you can talk to fellow users and share recipes and tips. Containing over 5 million foods, the app’s database is huge. The app also lets you save your favorite foods so that you can easily add it. One drawback of this app is that since most of the foods are uploaded by users of the app, the calorie and nutritional count may not be very accurate.
- SparkPeople
SparkPeople is a pretty popular calorie counter app that tracks activity, exercise, goal and progress, and nutrition. The food diary is simple to use and follow. If you eat the same thing multiple times, it is easy to add in it. Besides showing the total calories, fat, protein, and carbs intake, there is a pie chart which visually showcases your consumption. With a barcode scanner, you won’t have to enter any details now. You can just scan! The huge and active community at SparkPeople is willing to share recipes, health tips, and more on their chat page. While the free version of the app offers a ton of features, you will have to pay if you are looking for their premium features.
- FatSecret
FatSecret is a completely free calorie counter app. It comes with a nutrition database, healthy recipes, food diary, exercise log, a user journal, and a weight chart. Its barcode scanner comes in quite handy when you want to log in consumption of packaged food. The home screen not only shows the consumption of food and the corresponding calorie intake, but also the breakdown of nutritional value, such as protein, fat, and carbs for every meal you have. FatSecret provides a monthly summary on how you did the past month, making it convenient to track in the long-term.
The calorie counter is pretty easy to use. If you are looking for tips or recipes, the chat community is the place to go. One place where they could improve is to clear up their interface which is rather cluttered at the moment.
- Lose It!
Lose It! Is another diet tracker app that comes with an exercise log and a food diary and should be featured in this list of Top 5 Diet Tracker Apps. Just as with MyFitnessPal, you will be able to connect the app to a fitness device or a pedometer. When you start using the app, you will be asked a series of questions about your personal statistics, based on which the app generates a set of personalized recommendation for your calorie intake. Thanks to a comprehensive database of food items, it is easy to add food that you consume. The barcode scanner is perfect for adding packaged foods. Lose It! also shows you visually with a graph on how you are faring with weight changes. The chat community is always ready and willing to help out.
To motivate its users, the team keeps coming up with dietary challenges that you can take up. Although the base app is free, its premium version comes with some added features. An interesting thing about its database is that it also has dishes from popular restaurants. A drawback of Lose It! is that it is somewhat difficult to add home-cooked meals and track its accurate calorie intake.
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