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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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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.
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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.
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See How You Eat Food Diary App.
What We Like
Simple, quick way to make a food journal.
Share photos on social media.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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