The Big Count
Since jumping on the Wegovy train and dieting, I have tried a variety of calorie counting apps. There are an awful lot of them out there. What you want, in the UK, is an app with a database of UK foods. You also want a fairly frictionless experience, because the more friction you introduce, the less likely you are to keep up with the record.
Why record at all? Well, bluntly, to keep track of what you eat, and to be honest with yourself about the kind of things you eat. Are you stuffing too many carbs, not enough fibre, not enough fresh veg? That kind of thing.
These apps usually have four slots to record things: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. And, if you are me, it is the snacks category that will be the one to reckon with. They all tend to have a set-up process, when you record your height, weight, and goals, and tell the app how active you are. After you’ve done all that, you can get going.
There are five I’ve taken a look at, and two of them can be dismissed quite quickly.
The Boots Online Doctor Tracker was the first I looked at, since I was using the Boots service to order my Wegovy. But the app doesn’t really do much, and it makes a lot of noise doing it.
Moving on, we have the free NHS app, Weight Loss, which also doesn’t do much. It has a database, but some of the choices you get offered when you search are odd. For example, search for Honey Nut Shredded Wheat as a breakfast item, and you get a number of hits, but you can’t go in and edit. It suggests 45g as the portion size, which fine. But what if you have 60g? Or 50? You can’t make that change. If you tap on the portion size, it offers you “2 pieces” as an option, which I guess is the full sized version. But then for “minis” you just get the slightly vague “small”, “medium”, and “large”. Furthermore, the app doesn’t remember your stuff, so you have to perform the same search every time.
The most popular app in the UK is MyFitnessPal, which has a free tier and a Premium tier. You get a lot of nagging to go Premium, which is annoying. It’s also infested with ads, also annoying. Without going Premium, you can do basic recording, but you can’t do things like scan package bar codes, which is actually quite a useful feature for lowering friction. Premium costs £65 for a year, or a frankly astonishing £16 per month. I guess they really want you to sign up for a year and then forget about it so that it automatically renews. What I tend to do with these things is pay and then immediately cancel, at which point you’re told your subscruption will continue until the renewal date.
Anyway, Premium is probably better than Free, and allows you to scan barcodes, use your voice to record, and even take photos of food for the app to estimate calories etc. More on this idea with the next app.
But I wouldn’t pay for MFP, because I think it’s too fiddly. Adding your own foods is a challenge, and the Quick Add feature is so basic as to be useless. You can’t name the food, just record the calories, and all other nutrients are a Premium feature. The other problem is that I think the database is full of cruft. Search for Honey Nut Shredded Wheat for example, and you get a massive list of every single permutation that has ever been entered by MFP users. O the humanity:
As you can see for that list, there are lots of variations on the “40g” serving, all with different calorie counts. I guess barcode scanning would take you in and allow you to record your own portion, but I also guess that that option would get added to the long list created by others.
Anyway, it’s all a bit of a faff, too much friction, too much cruft. And expensive!
So I moved on to MyNetDiary, which is also very very fiddly and also offers barcode scanning and food photography. It is thoroughly AI-ified, which is not the attractive feature the vendor thinks it is. I don’t want an AI coach, and I think the gimmick of taking a photo of your meal is silly. I mean, it’s pretty good at identifying things, I’ll give it that. But then it estimates the number of calories etc., and that’s where it falls down. The whole point of recording is to record. Not to guess. I could guess myself, I’m smarter than an AI. But I want the actual number.
It is cheaper, though, and offers more under the Free tier than MFP. For example, I think you can do barcode scanning and voice input as well as custom foods, all for free. It also doesn’t demand you create an account. And the Premium features (many of which are overkill) cost from £3.99 per month. There are too many upgrade options, which is confusing, but there’s an annual plan for £24.
It’s an American app, but does have UK foods in its database, although they might be garbled. For example, Honey Nut Shredded Wheat comes up as Honey Nut Shreddies Wheat, which is muddling it up with a whole different product. Once you’ve found something, though, it is easy to find it again.
But look at the dashboard below and you might see a problem. How, exactly, do you record what you had for breakfast? It’s not immediately obvious. You have to tap the little pie chart, which brings up the meal list. Why not put the meal list on the dashboard? You might well ask.
Mostly what I’m cooking for a main meal is a Slimming World Kitchen recipe, with known values for calories, protein, fibre etc. MND allows you to record your own food – in a more useful way than MFP, but it also refuses to record things unless you enter them just right, which is fiddly.
I think the dashboard is a mess. It will also only record two headline numbers (in the case above, protein and calories), with no option to add, say, fibre. Tapping the pie chart takes you into what should be the dashboard proper.
On the Record screen above, you can see there’s a + and a barcode symbol, but also an AI thing, which is where you take a pic of your dinner. As I said, it’s very good at seeing what’s on the plate. But then it will arbitrarily decide your thin crust pizza is a deep crust, and you can’t do much about that, because making changes is a real challenge. It’s also really hard to delete something you did by mistake.
Finally, we turn to Calorie Counter + by Nutracheck, which also has a confusing array of upgrade options. When I went for Premium, it charged me £6.99 for a month, but there is also a £3.99 option. I don’t know what that gets you. One year is £28. Or £30. Or £35. It’s confusing. Or £45, apparently.
These app vendors need to sort out their upgrade options and simplify. ONE price for a month and ONE price for a year. Nothing else.
Anyway, the app itself is pretty good. Here’s the dashboard:
Don’t judge meIt’s also pretty good at remembering your frequent choices.
Don’t judge me, I saidAnd the Quick Add screen is delightfully unfussy:
You name it, you record cals, protein and fibre (my choices), and it’s done. You can also go into a day and copy something from there into a new day, same meal or different meal. All without too much friction.
Finally, if you’ve got the time, you can record a recipe from scratch and save it in your own custom list—even assign it to a meal occasion. Here are some of my lunches over the summer and autumn.
All in all, this is a much better app than the popular MyFitnessPal, simpler than other options. It’s also more UK-friendly, and entering foods is fairly friction-free. So that would be my recommendation: Calorie Counter + by Nutracheck.
#Apps #CalorieCounting #diet #Dieting #fitness #Food #Health #nutrition