Counting Calories: Apps to Help with Diet

Counting calories has been a part of every food diet and weight loss program. The idea behind counting calories is that a person has a recommended daily caloric intake, and this is the minimum required for a person not to starve. If you eat more than the minimum on a regular basis, you start to store fat. If you don’t burn off the calories in exercise, you add to your fatty deposits. If you want to diet, you should start burning calories as well as lower your intake.

Beside the advent of the iPhone and the smartphone, apps have been developed to help keep track of calories. Since then, calorie counting apps have added more features and have become more sophisticated. The five apps below are representative of current capabilities, and these are also considered as some of the most popular apps for dieting. If you cannot count calories because of your cell phone, you should have it checked at the nearest iPhone repair center.

Fooducate

Fooducate is a popular calorie counter app, which is useful for the general population as well as by those who have diabetes. One feature of this app is that it has a food database which it uses to analyze your food intake. Analya=zing the calories and the sources of calories allows the app to help you choose which food to take. This leads to a healthier diet and more weight loss. It also has an active community forum which can help with support and answers for weight loss as well as for diabetes.

MyFitnessPal

This app uses tabs like containers for food that you regularly eat. This makes it easier to search for particular food or food items. MyFitnessPal also uses pie charts to show a breakdown of the food you ate, in slices of fat, carbohydrates, and proteins, which are then compared to preset diet goals. The charts are available for daily and weekly food intake. Users can take down notes about their exercise, or their food, especially how their exercise or food made them feel. Graphs are also used to track yearly goals. The app can also use data from fitness wearables.

Lose Weight Without Dieting

For a calorie counter app, the name may sound weird. However, it has been proven that a change in lifestyle and food habits offer better long-term results than a short-term diet. Lose Weight Without Dieting has seen plenty of interest and downloads. I try to take the pain out of dieting and aims to create a great experience fo the user. It has all the calorie counting tools, including trackers for calories, weight, and fitness. It has weight loss plans, as well as other metrics. It also tries to motivate by rewarding you for using it every day.

FatSecret

Counting calories do not make sense unless it has context. FatSecret puts the calories into context by breaking down the intake to daily, monthly and meal-by-meal counts. It also makes using the platform very easy, at least to begin with. You can use Google+, Facebook or email accounts to sign in. It uses a database of the most common food items and their caloric makeup and count.

Type the food item, and the app will look up the necessary information. The food items are easy to find. If necessary, the information is also easy to adjust. If you feel that you need to drill down, FatSecret allows that option. It is very specific. You could drill down to the breakdown of every meal if you wanted to. Fitness and diet have large communities where people depend on for support.

FatSecret makes use of that with the use of a chat community. The forum and community are also accessible in the app. If you have problems with the app, it is easy to get this fixed at your nearest cell phone repair shop.

SparkPeople Calorie Counter

Spark is an online community which is dedicated to good health and healthy living. The SparkPeople Calorie Counter has turned out to be a very popular diet and nutrition app. Like most calorie counting apps, it makes use of a database, this time with a base of more than 3.5 million food items and growing.

If your food has a barcode, the app can scan the barcode for easy data entry. The barcode reader is a nifty accessory for your smartphone. You can go through the supermarket and scan foods as you go to see their nutritional value and calorie count. Aside from other calorie counting features, it also has a fitness tracker. The data can be viewed on your smartphone, or on a desktop.

The above apps may not seem to very much, nor do they seem any different from one another. However, it is the ease of use for each app which makes one better than the rest. The above apps are easy to use, and can usually be accessed on the desktop as well. You do not need a USB cable to transfer data between cellphone and desktop.