Recommended food tracking apps?

Great question, Gary. Unfortunately, that is not a current feature, but one we’re hoping to roll out in our next set of features, hopefully before year’s end. In some sense, if you backup your text messages you’ll have a feed of your data, but obviously not in the matched and organized structure that TextCalories provides.

I want to assure you and any other QS’er that this IS a feature that TextCalories will offer in the near future. We’re just taking baby steps and trying to get a significant following so that we can get more traction and, more importantly, more resources devoted to getting better features like exporting rolled out!

Thanks for that fast and thorough answer. Export is a must have for me. I like the idea of texting a food journal, but only if I can then export in a nice csv format for mashing with my other data…

I like Pictrition, it’s a new app that just launched tracking food photos. The idea is based on food journaling and presents more of a quality look at your overall intake vs. focusing on macro/micro nutrients.

It’s simple and free.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pictrition/id721125149?mt=8

2016 update: I’ve been using MyFitnessPal, albeit reluctantly. They’ve introduced “Verified foods”, but they still leave a lot to be desired - for instance, if you search for “cucumber”, you’ll find 40 (forty) almost identical entries, all “verified”.

Or check this gem:

Many other users have complained about “verified foods”. I’ve found tons of typos in the food names, as well as duplicates and abused or misunderstood brand names (like in the “chicken” example above).

MFP doesn’t record when you ate a meal; you can assign some vague time to it, breakfast/lunch/dinner/snacks. This is highly frustrating, and at the same time pretty easy to implement.

As of October 2016, you still can’t report incorrect foods from the mobile app.

MyFitnesPal don’t offer a data export option, even though it’s a task an intern could probably complete in a week, and tons of 3rd party solutions have cropped up.

However, once you accumulate a list of recent foods, it becomes easier to track if you keep eating only those foods.

I take psychotropic medication and had a BMI over 30 for many years. Last year I started working on a very simple voice calorie counter for Android phones. I lost about 13 lbs using it (some weight crept up over the holidays but I am getting back on track.)

Using Google speech recognition to enter in food values is pretty cool. I do a lot of guesstimating on calories but I have found that even just tracking the number of items I eat and especially the number of servings of fruits and veggies (I try to get 7) is really handy.

My calorie data is very very noisy but the sheer simplicy of entering food so quickly makes my app enjoyable for me to use and despite the noise, a least squares fit of data does indeed seem to show that I am eating less and less over time:

The beauty of fast voice entry is that you are more likely to be honest with recording data. I can’t tell you how many times I wouldn’t record a late night snack on myfitnesspal. On my app, it’s so easy I don’t have an excuse.

Calorie values are practically only good for one or two significant digjts. Simplicy of logging is what I am finding to be most powerful.

Check out my prototypes at:


https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rfo.voCalPRO

This is my weight log while using my app… I usually average about 0.25 to 0.3 lb weight loss. It may not seem impressive but I take Risperidone which notorious for causing weight gain and metabolic problems.

We are working on an iPhone version which may be out in a couple months.

If you would like to contribute to our project, check out our indiegogo campaign:

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So today was pretty good… After using it for over a year, I am finally figuring out what works best for me to use the app to help me lose weight and eat healthy… A great diet hack I finally started applying this week is waiting 4 hours between meals. I use the hrs timer on voCal to check when I last consumed calories and it works great! Also been tagging my fruits and veggies and making sure I get at least 5 servings every day. (version 3.04 published today should be launching much zippier since I eliminated another major bottleneck this afternoon)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rfo.speakcc

I suggest using cronometer, you can create and save your own food database and if you are serious about results it will seriously help you reflect on your intake. Most importantly for you it meets your criteria.

2019-April update

MyFitnessPal Calorie Counter is what I’d recommend. It does let you edit nutrition information if you find it mismatches the label, and you can use the edited product right away.

2016-October update

It’s mind boggling how not one single Android app I’ve tested lets you fix/override the incorrect nutrition data it gets from their database, or add missing macros:

  • SparkPeople Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker (also, doesn’t support weight gain goals)
  • Lose It (also, doesn’t support weight gain goals)
  • LiveStrong MyPlate Calorie Tracker

Again, all the apps above don’t let you fix incorrect nutrition data. These apps have millions of users and very well-funded companies behind them, yet apparently have focused resources on marketing rather than functionality.

I live in California, so I’m eating some of the most common foods these apps target, yet there are still mistakes.

MyNetDiary PRO is the only app I’ve found that appears to support editing foods, but:

  • they call the feature “Custom foods”, which other apps (e.g. MyFitnessPal) have as well (and for free) - you just enter the nutrition data from scratch, as if you prepared the meal yourself
  • they charge for a feature that enriches their databases. This is crowdsourcing done wrong. Plus, you can add custom foods from the website anyway. Don’t know what they were thinking.

The best food tracking app of the lot

Despite its shortcomings, so far the best choice among these apps is MyFitnessPal. While you can’t correct data in the mobile app, you can do so on the website, and the data will sync to the app within seconds. If you scan a barcode and there’s a mismatch against the actual nutrition label, you can search for the item on the website (by name), correct the data (please add something like “per 2016-Oct label”), then match the barcode to the food you’ve just corrected.

In its premium/subscriber version, MFP also lets you have different caloric+macronutrient goals per day of the week, which can be handy for certain diets, e.g. extra carbs on bodybuilding training days for muscle gain.

Note: I haven’t tested MyNetDiary yet.

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+1 to all of the deficiencies pointed out on this thread about existing food tracking apps, including the fact that you have to export your data into Excel to draw any causations/correlations/insights to begin with.

The idea to build a one-place holistic health app that makes inputting your food quick and confident + gives you insights by drawing correlations and causations from your food, exercise, etc. data + helps you build habits you need to ramp up overtime to achieve your goals has been rattling in my head since 2013. In the past month I have gotten really serious about pursuing it as a full-time effort. Such a thing needs to exist.

I am currently doing customer interviews to understand (a) if there are problems beyond what I pointed out above, and (b) what are the top use cases, even within the broad problem areas I pointed out above, that need to be addressed in a first MVP. My plan is to first create an early private beta of 10 people who already log their food daily, co-create/iterate with them rapidly week over week to get to a product we all feel is well worth the effort of inputting data, then expand the audience from there slowly in progressive rings.

If you are interested in being part of this co-creation/private early beta or have further questions, please email me at richa.p1@gmail.com. Thanks!

I’m curious if anyone has tried https://getsmartplate.com/?

I’m really curious if anyone has any better apps they use now? (This thread is pretty old.)

I’ve been using MyNetDiary because I want the time stamps and the ability to track blood glucose. I’ve also used MFP and MyMacros+ (I really like the macro info in that last one, but it has no time stamp, nor does MFP–at least last I checked.)

MyNetDiary is my first choice right now. It downloads a nice excel file thats easy to use. It has a decent size food database (not as large as MFP), and as I said, it has the time stamps I want.

I recently started using a CGM and so I don’t need the food tracker to also log BG. Though I do still prick my finger a couple times a day or so to calibrate the CGM. So it wouldn’t be terrible to log that in the same food tracker.

Anyone have something they like better than MyNetDiary?

I am helping beta test a new speech based food diary for iOS: http://www.coco-nutrition.com

I also just published a new flavor of my own quick entry diary/tracker for Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rfo.Acal

I like my own tracker a lot because it basically allows you to rate each entry as helpful or harmful and you can track stats on that. I basically label fruits, veggies and lean proteins as helpful and high glycemic, high sodium or fried foods as harmful. I like mine too because it launches and exits pretty fast. You can also use it to track daily parameters like #weight, #systolic etc…

The CoCo app should be more useful to me after it is ported to Android. It uses Nutritionix’s database right now but the Apple speech recognition API needs a little improvement.

@mookiebearapps: Thanks for the info about coco. I can’t use the other because I am a mac/iOS person right now.

Just as another data point for your logging, lots of fruit is high glycemic for me. I’ve been wearing a glucose monitor. Here’s the BG graph of me eating an apple. I started eating where the first box on the left is:

I need to test berries!

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Thank you @JessicaK for reviving this thread - you are right, it’s time to find out what people are using now, it’s been a long time and a lot has changed. I’ll tweet this request out from the QS account and maybe we’ll find some new tools.

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@Agaricus: Thank you!

I’m a huge fan of Cronometer. It takes time to build the food tracking habit, but their food database is so high quality. I love it

I get pretty frustrated with MyFitnessPal: it just seems their data entry could be streamlined a lot more. I even made my own voice clipboard app so that I could jot stuff down and later paste it into MFP.

Interestingly the new CoCo app lets you paste in huge strings so you could paste in your whole day in one big sentence. It usually still needs some edits though.

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Loseit was mentioned twice in the Twitter replies.

@Agaricus: I actually had downloaded LoseIt years ago–I’m looking now and I don’t see timestamps–which I realize not everyone may care about. But I do :slight_smile: I can’t remember why I stopped using it then.

@quantifiedketonian: I’ve been trying Cronometer for a couple days now. It does look good for a lot of things. I do have to go to Gold version to get the time stamps, but that’s okay. The organization seems to leave a lot to be desired. It dumps all my data on one diary page? (Like if I have it sync’ed with other apps.) I saw I could make groups, but I still have to scroll through them all? I can’t, say, hide a group’s entries? Weird to me that it’d work that way, so maybe I’m missing something. But the database is great and very detailed, and the interface to create recipes was pretty nice. Oh, and I really liked the ability to easily change units (like from grams to ounces to cups or tablespoons or whatever.) It has a lot of options that way.

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Just a side comment to say what you’re doing is so cool! But that’s not much a spike… btw, here’s me eating an apple:

Right now I’m tracking everything manually, but I too would like a time-stamp.