Reviewing the Five Best Calorie Counter Apps of 2015
Calorie counters are meant to make losing weight or staying in shape fairly effortless. These apps do all the math for you and suggest diet improvements so that you’re burning more calories than you’re consuming. But which apps deliver what they promise?
We’ve been reviewing the top meal tracking apps based on features and usability, splitting them up into these three categories:
Food journal apps — A diary of recent meals to evaluate your eating habits, determine patterns, and make smarter choices
Calorie counters — Tracks caloric input and output and offer the data and trends you need to optimize your nutrition
Healthy eating apps — Library of healthy eating tips, nutritional information and other important details about your food
In our last blog we suggested 3 Great Food Journal Apps to Log Your Diet in 2015. This time, we’ll evaluate some of the top calorie counters on the market based on features and usability, covering both the most popular ones, as well as a few hidden gems.
Cost: Free
If you’re going to talk calorie counters, you pretty much have to cover MyFitnessPal. It’s a hugely popular app that boasts more than 80 million users, according to reports. Its biggest perks are a large database — more than 1 million listed foods — its cost (free for both iOS and Android), and its compatibility with numerous exercise and tracking apps. The downside is that MFP’s user-supported database is crowded with repeat and dated entries. You’re also on your own when it comes to estimating portion sizes, leading to sometimes shaky calorie counts.
Cost: Free
Lose It! is another popular and well-reviewed app, and like MyFitnessPal, it covers all the basics. You input your nutrition goals and body type, and if you keep up with your food and exercise logging, Lose It! will tell you exactly how many calories you have left each day. It also includes barcode scanning and integrations with all of the top activity trackers, fitness apps and social networks. The downside is Lose It! has a smaller database than others, and adding in custom foods is a bit slow and clunky. If you want to log a restaurant dish or something you made at home, you’ll need to input all the nutritional information yourself — a tedious task that turns a lot of people off food logging in the first place.
SparkPeople Calorie Counter & Weight Loss
Cost: Free
SparkPeople.com has been around for years as an online weight loss community, and its mobile app claims to boost the biggest food database of any tracker with more than 2 million items. Rather than require you to stick to a single number, the app provides a daily calorie range for some wiggle room. It’s fairly easy to log your food, you get access to a ton of articles and tips, and if you’re a member of the SparkPeople.com forums, you can chat with other members right in the app. However, if you want a simpler experience you might find the app clunky given the presence of ads, reminders and point systems.
Cost: Free
Noom Coach, available for both iOS and Android, does things a bit differently than the other, more mainstream apps. After you set your health and wellness plan, you’re given daily fitness and nutritional tasks, which might include walking 10,000 steps or reading an article. Meal logging is one of these tasks, and the interface makes it easy to search for and add items. Foods are graded on green-yellow-red scale of nutritional value, and if you pay for the premium versions (which start at $9.99 per month), you can gain access to a virtual support group or personal coach for tailored encouragement.
Cost: Free
This app solves the tedious food logging problem with one interesting feature: voice entry. You can simply speak your meal and the app will estimate the calories for you. The app also tracks your water intake, lets you input and track unique goals and offers a letter-grade evaluation of your daily intake based on nutritional value. The downside is a fairly crowded interface that’s loaded up with social updates and widgets. It’s available for iOS and Android.
Check out our last blog on food logging apps, and stay tuned for our review of healthy eating apps.
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