3 Great Food Journal Apps to Log Your Diet in 2015
Activity trackers are great for monitoring the progress of your workouts, but meal trackers can actually be even more valuable for keeping an eye on your overall health. If you’re not supplementing your exercise with good nutrition, you might not be getting the full value out of your workouts.
Plenty of smartphone apps can help you track your meals, and the right one for you depends on your overall nutrition goals. We’re drawing a bit of a line between food journal apps, calorie counters and general healthy eating apps, because each suits different health objectives (although there is plenty of overlap, and some of these apps include functions that cross over into other categories).
Food journal apps let you jot down recent meals so you can evaluate your eating habits (good or bad) and keep yourself honest. You can track meals historically to see how your habits have changed.
Calorie counters also track the meals you eat, but are more designed to spit out the numbers and data you need to meet daily calorie objectives. Quantified Self-ers are all about these apps.
Healthy eating apps are great resources for maintaining a good diet. You can find healthy meal ideas, nutrition information on the food you buy, and other contextual information.
Today we’re talking food journaling — we’ll cover the rest of the meal tracking apps in future posts. One of the big gripes about keeping a food journal is that it takes a lot of work to track meals accurately. Other challenges, according to one study, include the fear of judgement, a lack of positive feedback, or discouragement from seeing everyone else in your social circle achieve results faster than you do.
So, we picked food journal apps that we think do a good job of addressing these challenges with innovative features and great usability. Here are some of our favorites:
Cost: Free
Larks calls itself a “nutritionist in your pocket,” and that’s because of its conversational approach. It works like a chat app — you text what you ate to Lark and “she” texts back some feedback, suggestions or even encouragement. You don’t have to input any nutritional information or count calories, so it’s less tedious than traditional food logs. And because the conversations seem natural and engaging, you might actually want to keep at it. The app learns from your history to suggest healthier eating habits, making your diet feel less like a diet. It’s available on iOS and the Apple Watch, while the Android version offers a more comprehensive fitness tracker.
Cost: Free
TwoGrand promises that you can log all your meals in just three minutes per day. All you have to do is take a picture of your food, and TwoGrand maintains an Instagram-like feed of everything you’ve recently consumed. The app also includes a social component, letting you follow other people who are around your target goal weight. That way, you’re keeping up to date on the eating habits and fitness routines of people whose nutritional goals are pretty similar to your own, and getting support from other folks who are on the same journey as you. TwoGrand is available for iOS and Android.
Cost: Free
MyNetDiary offers much more functionality beyond food journaling, but its diary earns high marks for being fast and easy to use. You use a search functionality to log your meals, but because MyNetDiary includes a Google Instant-like functionality that will suggest a result to you while you type. The app also offers predictive search, relying on your past meal history to suggest foods that you eat often while you type. You can also automatically log nutritional data with barcode scanning if you’re interested.
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