Can anyone recommend diet tracker tool with built-in ability to export data? For me it is unacceptable to be locked in - I would prefer to write my own.
Fitbit is pretty good about making your data exportable. It’s diet tracker is decent, but not as good as other apps that focus on that primarily like Lose It (which unfortunately doesn’t have any export ability). I’d recommend Fitbit because their general attitude about data is that it’s yours. Also, they are a solid company that should be around for a long time and they have mature APIs that allow other apps to easily sync your data.
MyFitnessPal is great. I’ve never tried to export data, but after a quick search I found this link that explains how to do it.
I see that export available to typical user ( https://www.fitbit.com/export/user/data ) has severe limitation - “You can export up to 30 days of data.”
Hopefully API will allow real export of all data, without doing every month manually (at least for me using API is not a problem, but I would expect most users to not be programmers…).
Yes, that’s a limitation, and the data itself is only marginally useful, but at least it’s available. Here is the data that’s available in the downloaded CSVs (in sections):
Body
Date,Weight,BMI,Fat
Foods
Date,Calories In
Activities
Date,Calories Burned,Steps,Distance,Floors,Minutes Sedentary,Minutes Lightly Active,Minutes Fairly Active,Minutes Very Active,Activity Calories
Sleep
Date,Minutes Asleep,Minutes Awake,Number of Awakenings,Time in Bed
Food Log 20150801
Daily Totals
“”,“Calories”,“0”
“”,“Fat”,“0 g”
“”,“Fiber”,“0 g”
“”,“Carbs”,“0 g”
“”,“Sodium”,“0 mg”
“”,“Protein”,“0 g”
“”,“Water”,“0 cup”