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Calorie counting app of choice?
Platform: Android
What is your calorie counting/meal planning application of choice? Looking for something simple and hyper-focused on calorie counting, and I'm ok with a bit of macro tracking, however that's all I want it to do - no feature creep into other wellness/fitness goals and coaching, etc.
I'm fine with paying (as long as it's reasonable) for a simple application without a ton of ads that does this one thing really well.
Suggestions?
I've been trying this out for a few months now (coming from MFP); It's been steadily improving though the flows around adding foods and tracking meals is still pretty rough to me in a few ways:
Congrats on the drop.
This looks like the sort of app I'm looking for - FOSS is just a bonus, doesn't look like it has feature creep at all just straight tracking.
Nobody has mentioned it yet but after extensively trying different apps "MacroFactor" is by far the best one.
Incredibly well designed app focused on calorie counting and macro tracking with a heavy focus on data-driven TDEE (metabolism+expenditure) calculation that adapts your calorie recommendations to your exact goals without requiring impossible 100% conformance to your plan. All of this moderate TDEE "coaching" can easily be overridden with static goals as well and would act as an incredible way to monitor your progress and effectiveness of your personal plan even without following any of the app's goals.
Absolutely zero advertisements, selling of data, or feature pay walling outside of a completely reasonable monthly payment.
The dev team pumps out incredible features at a shocking pace, it already beats out the feature-set of almost every single other app without scope-creep into fitness, lifestyle, or social features. All of which are designed with a "least-actions to accomplish the task" UI mindset.
I cannot give their team more praise, you can get a two week free trial with codes they directly advertise on their website and never expire.
The entire experience is built to accommodate things like eating out, vacations, cheat days, and the rest of life's obstacles that make people quit other apps. There's support for losing large amounts of weight, lean cutting, maintaining, and bulking that all adapt to your progress as you go.
They're super active in their community as well with feature suggestions and great science based articles around health and fitness.
I'm so in love with it I wish I could just force everyone else to try it to understand how much better it is.
Another rec for MacroFactor. The team behind it (Stronger By Science) are very well established in the strength training and fitness research communities. I don't know them personally but as a second degree connection and they pass the sniff test for trust and data stewardship. Philosophically very oriented towards "coherence neutral" meaning your goal is your business, their product is just a tool to track energy in and estimate energy out.
Second MacroFactor. I used it for a while and am about to start using it again after a break due to life circumstances.
One thing I loved is how absolutely non-judgemental it was. It’s not gamified in a way some other apps are that can lead to tremendous anxiety and an unhealthy focus on the raw numbers. Another plus is how it automagically calculates TDEE, so after a week or so it has a (very) good idea of your average expenditure, and you’re not having to enter every little activity into the app to try and keep things accurate.
I'm also a user of MacroFactor after trying a slew of apps. I use mine for weight training and am incredibly happy with what it offers. I will gripe though that I find the UI way too unintuitive, the app is difficult for me to navigate
When I was food tracking I thought Cronometer was excellent. I did end up paying the fee after a few months, but was also happy with the free usage over that time. Pretty clean app, lots of preference options for how exactly you want to track. I thought the macro tracking was helpful as I wanted to be sure I wasn't systematically missing certain nutrients while cutting calories down. Very robust database, with the ability to add/upload things manually that can then potentially be accepted by the team for general use. Good support for custom recipes and foods as well.
I've been using "Lose it!" mainly because I like the integrations it comes with, such as Garmin (watch tracking) and Withings (scale tracking). On days I work out extra hard or do more yard work than normal, the app automatically adjusts my allowed calorie intake for the day. And the scale integration helps keep the app updated towards the estimated completion date of my goals based on weigh ins.
Love “Lose It”. It’s help me keep track of pretty much everything and the free version is fantastic by itself. I happily pay for premium for the goal tracking and macros and whatnot but in its barest and free form it stood out way above the others for me.
Waistline. FOSS, private, no bs, and has everything you'd need (except for an online database of food calories, but you rarely use that, and for when you do there are websites like Nutrionix)
Cronometer.
I'm not super up to date as to what people use now but I've been logging consistently on that for the last 8-ish months or so.
MyFitnessPal is the one I use- for those of us outside UK/US/AUS/EUR it has a massive database which isn't limited to Western foodways unlike many of the others. Available on both Android and iOS.
Nutracheck, hands down the best app I've used.
I killed off 28lbs in two months just using it religiously and weighing my portions.
I'm about to go back on in November for a solid month as the lbs are creeping back on due to a back injury and me depressive eating.
What's the database of it like? I've found with many apps that they would lack a ton of products, and I just didn't have the energy to manually input things. And does it let you add complete recipes/meals in? I tried using the fitbit app, but needing to add things one by one just killed any drive
I'm in the UK and it has absolutely everything.
FatSecret, which is a stupid name, but I've found the free version to have pretty much everything I needed to drop 30lbs over the last year. I wasn't worried about getting access to recipes or tracking my water intake. The free version lets me add foods not already in their database easily as well as my own recipes, set a weight goal and daily calorie goal and see my weight check-ins and daily/weekly/monthly caloric intake on a nice little graph (plus there's a little spot to add a note at each weighing), and check my basic macros (I'm terrible at eating enough protein). Probably there are fancier apps bit it took care of evrything I'm interested in.
Been using Fatsecret for a long time, but almost always it drives me mad when it takes its sweet time to load the food info when I'm already weighting things. And there were a handful of times after I selected all, it simply cancels everything and I lose what I selected.
Now I just add what I'll eat before weighting and then edit the values after.
I use MyFitnessApp.
Though when I was a teenager trying to lose weight for the first time I would search the caloric content on Calorie King and then add it up on my phone's calculator app and just have it there.
Do you mean MyFitnessPal? That’s the one I have been using for the past 10 years or so.
Yeah
As someone switcing to iOS... anyone have any suggestions over there? Sucks I've only found about Waistline today after being annoyed with the other options on Android.
See my comment about MacroFactor, it's awesome and they just released full widget support for iOS as well!
Opened it up and oh boy is there a lot of complicated questions that, as a casual exerciser, i find hard to answer right off the bat. Its also very serious, and gets right into it which is a bit intimidating haha. I'm very curious though because there looks like a lot of potentially inspiring data looking back at me so ill give it a real shot. Thanks
Just know that those starter questions about exercise level and body fat percentage don't have to be super accurate, they're just to give the expenditure model some starting values but it will always adjust and adapt to the correct values with time and accurate data. All of the goals can be adjusted or fully changed at any time later as well!
It has an ever so slightly bigger learning curve than other apps because it has such powerful features, and that's exactly why it's awesome! They have a very helpful FAQ page and the /r/MacroFactor subreddit is full of great info, the devs see every single post and usually respond to any questions if the community doesn't answer them first.
I used to have to use manual and terribly complex TDEE calculation spreadsheets in excel to accomplish the same things this app does for me, I'm so grateful for its existence that I will happily advertise for it and do frequently spend time answering questions on the subreddit.
Even without all those features once you understand the shortcuts and flow of the UI it's my favorite food tracker on design alone.
This may be unhelpful, but I decided I would give it a mention anyway.
I just set up a spreadsheet in google docs, measured what I ate or ingredients I used by the gram and logged everything. Wolfram Alpha and nutrition labels provided calories per serving and grams per serving, math from that gave me calories per gram for everything and that was all I needed.
It is certainly less convenient than an app I will concede, but I have learned in more nuanced detail about what foods are calorie lite and which are calorie dense.
Probably not the solution you are looking for though.