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Logging home-cooked foods is always more difficult with Lose It! than with MyFitnessPal, because figuring out the calorie counts and serving sizes for these foods is much harder than with prepackaged portions. The app includes a database of supermarket brands as well as restaurant chain choices, all with calorie counts included.
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Logging new entries is easy - you just tap the plus sign on the upper right of the screen, pick the meal you're recording and search for the food in the app's nutrition database. The Lose It! food diary feature is visually appealing, with icons representing each food entry. The app then tracks this calorie budget with a circle icon and a weekly graph on the homepage. Users enter their weight, height, age and weight goals into Lose It! and get a personalized daily calorie-intake recommendation. This app lacks a few features found in MyFitnessPal, but its food diary feature is arguably easier to navigate. Lose It! is an all-around health tracker that includes a built-in pedometer and an exercise log. This free app ranked high in our " Best Health and Fitness App" ratings, in part because of its comprehensive food diary feature. (Image credit: Stephanie Pappas for Live Science)įor our pick of best-calorie-counting app, the app that it is in a neck-and-neck race with MyFitnessPal is Lose It! ( iOS (opens in new tab), Android). This screen in the LoseIt! app shows all of the food eaten during one day.
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Finally, lovers of wearables will like that MyFitnessPal can pull in data from fitness trackers, including devices from Fitbit and Jawbone. A blog serves up healthy recipes and exercise routines. Users can also participate in the MyFitnessPal forums, which include conversations on recipes, weight-loss tips and success stories. The app can set up optional reminders to record weight or foods. MyFitnessPal has graphs tracking progress toward goals going up to a year or more.
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A nice bonus is the notes section, where users can write anything about their food or exercise that day - perhaps a reminder of how eating a particular food made them feel, or what effect a certain exercise had on their mood. Both daily and weekly charts are available. These breakdowns are then compared to the user's diet goals for each. A pie chart shows an estimated breakdown of the number of calories you've consumed from carbohydrates, fats and proteins. MyFitnessPal also saves frequently entered foods to a tab for quick entry, and allows users to save their favorite meals in another easy-to-search spot. (Image credit: Stephanie Pappas for Live Science) One of the best features of the MyFitnessPal app is its large, searchable nutrition database.
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