But that kind of social pressure, combined with friendly support, can help keep you motivated. It’s quite another to confess to a bunch of dieting do-gooders that you ate an entire packet of Oreos last night. After all, it’s one thing to brag about your fabulous life on Facebook. To some extent, social features may seem unwanted in a diet app. MyFitnessPal and MyNetDiary stand out as offering the most comprehensive suite of reporting tools, which may explain how they justify charging so much more than their competitors. While most offer some rudimentary stats free of charge, to get the really good stuff - like which foods you commonly eat that contain the most calories, or the ability to see aggregated stats beyond the day-by-day view - you’re going to have to pony up for premium features. The whole point of logging calories is to gain useful insights about your diet. So perhaps it is no wonder that this is where the app developers start to raise their paywalls. MyFitnessPal offers some particularly clever options in its goals, allowing for cheat days and setting calorie goals for individual meals.
When I entered a weight-gain goal in the app, it incorrectly labeled the info a “weight maintenance goal.” One app I tested did not support weight-gain goals, although given that it is called “Lose It!,” perhaps I should not have been surprised. While most people use calorie trackers to lose weight, some may want to put on pounds if, for example, they are athletes attempting to build more muscle or they have been advised by their doctor that they are underweight. Goal-setting featuresĮvery app I tested helps you set a goal when you start using it.
Most apps don’t bother with logging the weight you lift in strength exercises, for example, while LifeSum and MyNetDiary bizarrely attempt to log exercises such as bench presses by duration rather than reps.Īrgus offers by far the best exercise logging, with a fully illustrated strength-training exercise database. Even calorie-tracking apps that do attempt to log exercise seem half-hearted about it. Counting calories burned from exercise can provide only a rough guide - they are not measured accurately enough to add and subtract precisely.Īs such, I don’t see much benefit to diet apps logging exercise (although you may say I’m biased because I co-created an exercise app). So, for example, if you go on a nice long run, you may burn enough calories to eat a nice tasty bun. The idea is that you can offset calories from the food you have eaten by keeping track of the extra calories you burn during exercise. Most diet apps make some attempt to offer exercise-logging features.
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