Calorie Counter by fatsecret 4+

It must be hard to find the right balance between simplicity and features when designing one of these apps. I think this one strikes that balance better than others. The free version includes all the features you need for the app to be useful. Premium has features that appear to have some real value (the meal plans look interesting), but I don’t get annoyed at what I can’t do without premium (I.e. the other app I formerly used recently made the barcode scanner a premium feature. That’s why I switched.) I love how it shows macros for the full day, by meal, and by item right there in the diary. I don’t have to open a separate report to see how I’m doing. I also don’t feel any pressure to buy premium, there’s not a lot of flashy adds or stuff to constantly try to draw you back to the app, like many apps do. While I haven’t bought premium, this level of polite suggestion is most likely to get me to try it at some point. I love that I open the app and it defaults to the diary tab, not the newsfeed. I find such social features to be toxic, so it’s great when they’re easy to ignore. Entering food is a bit clunky, but will get easier as I populate it with foods I eat the most. One feature I’d like (and have requested from other apps in the past) is a simple check box by each food item. It doesn’t even have to do anything, just a visual display. This way, I can pre-enter my meals and check items off as I actually eat them.

This is one of the best food and macro trackers I’ve used. After experimenting with four or five others, I’ve been using this one now for the last six months. It allows me to share my diary with my dietitian. You can scan the barcode on the food instead of having to manually enter all of the information. When I search for a food many times I find the exact thing I’m looking for. My spouse uses the premium version, so he’s able to add recipes easily and get the nutrition information from the recipes within the app into his diary with one click. I wish there was a Family version so we didn’t both have to pay for premium in order for me to get that feature. I wish the water tracking feature wasn’t part of premium, but it’s easy to track your water along with each meal by searching for it as a food. It has the ability to customize the percentage of each macro that you’re targeting for the day so that in addition to tracking calories, I can keep track of how close I am to targets for protein and carbs.

Moved to Fat Secret after another program I was using was discontinued. Really like it so far, except for how it keeps and organizes your eaten/entered foods. With my old program, I had to hand enter all my nutrition information, so when I saw I could simply scan the barcode with Fat Secret, I was stoked! Until the next day when I wanted to enter the item again. First issue: If you enter something for dinner, you have to be eating it at dinner again, or it is much harder to find in your recent foods (if it’s there at all…second issue). To get around this, I enter it at the same meal I ate it originally, however this is not accurate and can make it seems like I ate way to many calories in one sitting. Also, there’s no search function on your recent foods, so I have to scan the list to try to find what I want entered. All this could be solved by simply having a searchable “foods eaten” tab. And by foods eaten, I mean not just foods entered. In other words the tab would include anything I searched in the foods tab (and was found in Fat Secret database), and foods I scanned the label for (so I don’t have to keep scanning because I can’t find it), and lastly, foods I manually entered. This may seem like it would quickly become an exhaustive list, and it will. But being searchable, it would be very quick to find the food you want entered into your log.