The Ultimate Selection: 6 Leading Food Diary Applications Explored

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Food journaling has never been easier with food-tracking apps for smartphones and tablets. Some of the best food-tracking apps use your phone’s camera to scan food label barcodes to track calories, macronutrients, and protein amounts in your food. We’ve compiled a few of our favorites to help you stay on track.

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Share Progress With Friends: MyFitnessPal

What We Like

• Connect with friends.
• Get motivation from the My Fitness Pal community.
• Extensive food and barcode library.

What We Don’t Like

• Smartphone interface can be clunky to use.
• Difficult to enter meals quickly.
• Many features behind a paywall.

With more than 14 million foods in its database and more than four million food barcodes, MyFitnessPal makes it easy to log breakfast, lunch, dinner, and afternoon snacks. And thanks to powerful metrics, My FitnessPal gives insights into calories, fat, protein, carbs, sugar, fiber, cholesterol, and vitamins.

Planning your meals and staying on track with your nutritional goals is easy, though not particularly speedy. And while advanced tools like macro recording and an intermittent fasting tracker require an upgraded paid subscription, food logging and goal setting is quite detailed with a free account.

Download For:

iOS

Android

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Learn What’s Lurking in Your Food: Fooducate

What We Like

• Takes the guesswork out of finding healthy foods.
• Tracks workouts as well.

What We Don’t Like

• Serving sizes are based on liters, not cups.
• The app can be expensive for full features.

Regarding eating, it’s not only the calories but the quality of your food that counts. Fooducate, by Maple Media, provides a comprehensive database of over 400,000 foods in supermarkets and breaks down just how nutritious they are.

Scan the barcode with your smartphone camera for an in-depth nutritional analysis of added sugars, trans fats, high-fructose corn syrup, food coloring, genetically modified organisms (GMO), additives, preservatives, and artificial sweeteners.

While features like a Food Grade, which helps you make smarter eating decisions, require a premium account, the free version allows you to personalize your tracking by entering your weight, age, and fitness goals. The iOS and Android apps have slightly different names, but the same company makes both.

Download For:

iOS

Android

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A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: See How You Eat

What We Like

• Simple, quick way to make a food journal.
• Share photos on social media.

What We Don’t Like

• Lack of photo editing capabilities.
• No calorie counter.

Rather than typing a daily log of your meals, snap a photo instead. See How You Eat, by Health Revolution Ltd, is an app built on the belief that seeing what you eat can help you make positive dietary changes.

This food-tracking app does exactly what it says. It lets you document your meals visually without complicated calorie or macronutrient support. You can also easily share photos on social media.

Download For:

iOS

Android

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Keep It Simple and Make It Useful: Stupid Simple Macro Tracker

What We Like

• Food bank tool helps conserve calories for special events.
• Intuitive interface.

What We Don’t Like

• Can sometimes be slow to load.
• Limited free features.

If you’re confused about counting your macros, Stupid Simple Macro Tracker by Venn Interactive can help. More than tracking what you eat, this app tracks your fat, protein, and carb levels.

Customize your macro levels and tag them with food icons to make it fast and easy to log your daily macros. This app also offers a Food bank tool to help you conserving calories for special events.

You don’t need an account to start logging and it’s easy to navigate, but the interface isn’t as attractive as alternatives. Like other options, features expand if you upgrade to a paid account.

Download For:

iOS

Android

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Get a Quick Summary of Your Nutrition: Lifesum

Click here

What We Like

• Beautifully-designed interface.
• Very easy to navigate.
• Tons of recipes to inspire different eating habits.

What We Don’t Like

• User-created info can be inaccurate.
• Premium features are expensive.
• Ads can be invasive.

Lifesum is a food-tracking app built on the idea that observing small habits can make a difference in meeting nutritional goals. With a comprehensive list of recipes and meal plans, Lifesum includes barcode scanning and macro tracking to monitor your daily nutrition and calories.

The attractive interface is also very easy to navigate, but ads pop up frequently. Appealing features, such as one of the many eating plans in the Programs tab, require a pretty hefty subscription. The app isn’t straightforward about letting you know which features aren’t free either. However, for food logging, Lifesum’s basic version ticks all the boxes.

Download For:

iOS

Android

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Use Points to Track Your Food: Healthi

What We Like

• Tracking points is easier than tracking calories.
• Supportive online community.

What We Don’t Like

• Unable to manually enter your food.
• All items must be pre-loaded into the app.
• No way to add your own recipes.

Once you start tracking your food, you’ll quickly begin to see that what you think you’re eating rarely matches what you actually eat. Healthi (formerly iTrackBites) helps you see how close you are to your nutritional goals by breaking down food items by calories, macro, and Bites—Healthi’s point system.

Use the app to keep track of your daily and weekly Bites allotment with your food diary, which has the support of a database of over one million products.

The drawbacks to the free version mirror others; recipes and targeted plans require a subscription. But you can still stay on track with your food logging goals and access some of the community-building features with a free account.

Download For:

iOS

Android

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