Jonathan Steedman (00:01.954)
Let's talk about calorie counting apps. Hey, I get this question a lot. What app should I use? What's the best app? I'm gonna go through some apps. I'm absolutely gonna mention some by name. The reality is this is not an extensive review. I have not spent hours on all of the calorie counting apps out there because I have so many better things to do with my time. And the reality is I think the answer is not, or the question shouldn't be what is the best one because you don't need perfect. You don't need, and I'll talk about that in a second.

So basically I'll go through some of my favorites and I use that term quite loosely, but just the ones that I've used personally slash ones I've maybe used with clients occasionally and a few of the different kinds of styles, I guess, if you will, of calorie tracking apps. So we'll go through that just to get it out of the way. This is not necessarily a podcast on tracking calories, but it must be said, tracking calories is not for everyone. Tracking calories is not the only way to lose weight. Tracking calories is not risk free for everyone.

but in the exact same time, tracking calories can be very helpful for some people. It can be very effective for some people. And it can be a hugely helpful tool to support or to help you move into a weight loss phase. I'm not, surely that was enough of a caveat for you to understand. I'm not saying everyone should track their calories or no one should track their calories. As always, there is a spectrum. You're hopefully gonna know where you land. And if you don't, you can maybe have a chat to someone to figure out what.

right movies for you. Anyway, I think I've got some podcasts on tracking calories, probably. If I don't, I'll make one. So cool. Look, I'm breaking this into really two types of tracking apps. There are tracking apps that you drive yourself essentially, and then there's the new kind of wave of coaching AI integrated apps, calorie tracking apps as well. I'll start with, look, the,

By far, probably the biggest one in the market is MyFitnessPal. I think it almost became like a verb. Like you Google something, you MyFitnessPal something. And it's fine, right? Yeah, it keeps pushing you to pay. You really don't need to pay for almost every goal. You can get close enough. So the reality with tracking calories is it's infinitely more about being consistent than it is hyper accurate. Sure, you wanna make sure your app is not wildly inaccurate, but...

Jonathan Steedman (02:29.749)
I know this is gonna hurt to hear, but you're not a robot, so your calorie expenditure is not perfectly exact every day. Therefore, your tracking of your intake doesn't need to be perfectly exact every day. Now, look, if you do have a goal of literally getting on stage as a bodybuilder, totally different story. But for mere mortals who just want to lose a bit of weight or improve their health or improve their performance or have that sort of goal, then you don't need to worry too much about finding the most accurate app available. You just wanna find something that's good.

and consistent and in something that you can use consistently, which is why I think probably the most important thing for apps is the usability. And that is a little bit of an opinion because an app that I find nice to use might be an app that you fricking hate. I personally find my fitness power fine to use. Definitely the plus side of it is it has a massive database, but it has kind of a user, I don't know what the correct term is probably like user managed database. But essentially what that means is they have pulled data from

like the USDA tables and government databases, but you also have a lot of entries that have been created by users. This is a double-edged sword. It means that their database is massive and it's probably unlikely that you're going to search for a food and not find it because everyone can add food. At some point, someone has probably added that food that you're looking for, but because just anyone can add it, means that the accuracy can sometimes be a little bit out. So.

If you're to use my fitness pal, that's fine. You might just need to pay a little bit more careful attention to some of the entries. I remember I, a long time ago when I was using it, was, it was like lamb, not shanks, lamb steaks or something. and the entry that I was using had zero grams of fat in it, which if you know anything about lamb is just not true. And so, yeah, that was too much of an inaccuracy, but I missed it because I wasn't just paying close attention to that. And so particularly if there's a food that you're going to use consistently,

make sure that that entry makes sense. might want to cross-reference it with another source of information if you can. That would be the only thing I would say about MyFitnessPal. other than, and this is kind of the case for all of these apps to be honest, except maybe the paid coaching ones, which we'll talk about in a second. They are going to calculate your calorie target for you. It's sometimes it's okay. Sometimes it's way out. So once again, I would always use a separate calorie calculator on the internet and cross-reference those two numbers. They don't need to be exact.

Jonathan Steedman (04:54.284)
But like if my fitness power tells you 1400 calories and the other Calculator tells you 1900 calories then yeah, you might need to talk to someone to try and figure out that But yeah, so just just a caveat there, I guess The app I personally use when I track and to be honest, haven't tracked in like at least six months I kind of go through phases of I'll do it for a little block when I've got a new goal or I'm having a major adjustment in my diet or my exercise goals and I just want to make sure that

as I'm adjusting to a new amount of food intake or a new amount of exercise that I'm not just trusting my body, because I fricking hate when people say, listen to your body, because oftentimes your body is dumb. And so I might track my intake for a week or two to make sure that I'm not eating too much or not eating too little, you know, just to get that right. And once I've become accustomed to that new amount of intake, then I typically don't bother tracking anymore. But anyhow, what I would use is Chronometer, really like Chronometer. I really like the user interface. I find it really helpful. It's definitely,

got a much more accurate database in my fitness pal and a lot of micro nutrient data, which is cool. I find it helpful because I'm a nerd and I like getting in-depth information on that stuff. And I don't have a tendency to get obsessed with numbers. I think that's just a personal attribute. Attribute? That sounded positive. I didn't mean that. That's a personality thing. And also, I guess, just with the amount of nutrition knowledge I have, I know that getting hung up on my iron intake every single day is not

what is required for optimal health. So anyhow, I like the micronutrient data. You might find it overwhelming or you might find that you're feeling like you're failing on so many fronts because you're not hitting all of those micronutrients each and every day. So if that's you, I think you might be able to turn off that function in Chronometer or maybe it's just not the app for you. But if you like keeping an eye on some of that stuff or you have had a deficiency in the past, like you are trying to rectify your iron intake, then tracking with something like Chronometer could give you

a little bit more of a granular look at your buying intake. Now, because of the quality of the database, like I said, the information's really good and really robust. It does mean that the database is much smaller. Because it is not a user controlled database, you often will find that you have to add more foods, particularly packaged, pardon me, packaged foods, which is fine. And once you've added them, they're in there for you. So it's not a huge deal. It's just something to be mindful of. But yeah, that's why for me, Chronometer,

Jonathan Steedman (07:20.23)
is my favorite that I use. Honorable mention also goes to Easy Diet Diary. I haven't spent much time with it myself, but I know a lot of other dieticians love it. And so that would be, if you've tried my fitness power chronometer and you didn't like either of them, Easy Diet Diary would be the other one that I would investigate. But again, don't have a ton of personal experience with that. actually I wasn't gonna talk about this app, but an app I use all the time in the group actually is called Foodview, all one word.

And it's actually a photo diary app. I really like it because you still are tracking your intake or you're still capturing your intake in a way that you get a good idea of how much you're eating, when you're eating, your pattern of eating, your portions, because you're seeing a visual representation of that, but you don't need to weigh anything or log any specific foods. And so if you're looking to track from a habit perspective, you might find that helps with accountability or you're wanting to maybe troubleshoot a certain part of your day that is

tricky, might find that every day before dinner, I just fall apart. I'm so hungry. Or after dinner, I can't stop eating. I find food view can be really helpful for you to capture your whole day. And you can kind of look back and be like, yeah, I didn't have lunch. Or my lunch was so small. Or maybe I skipped breakfast. It can help you still troubleshoot those days because it has still captured your whole day, but in a much quicker way of just snapping a photo versus logging numbers. So I find that one really helpful.

So you might want to give that a try instead of one of these numbered apps. Cool. The last two I will mention, this is moving into the, I say AI, everything's AI now, like AI coaching. So the two main ones that I have, that I would recommend are carbon and macro factor. The way these differ from things like MyFitnessPal and Chronometer is you log your progress in terms of like body composition and performance and things.

and then they will manually adjust your numbers accordingly. Yeah, according to that data. And so that can be really helpful. Unlike my fitness power where if you're not losing the weight and you are tracking properly, it will just continue to tell you to hit that number. Whereas carbon or macro factor might adjust your macros or adjust your total calorie target. Also really like them because they allow you a little bit more to set up.

Jonathan Steedman (09:44.809)
Actually, I'm almost positive you can do this in Cronometer. Yeah, you can, which is why I like it. But you don't have to just have the same calorie target all day. You can shoot for a weekly average and have some higher days and some lower days of calorie intake, which is one of my favorite ways to structure my week, because I have different amounts of food I wanna eat on different days. And so those AI coaching apps help with that. But largely they are about giving you the feedback on, okay, you've lost this much this week. You're probably eating too little or maybe you're eating too much and we need to adjust that. And they're really good.

I personally have used Carbon for a while, not for 18 months. a little bit, Lane Norton unfortunately has gone off the deep end, think, sadly. But that app, when I last used it about 18 months ago, it was really good. And I enjoyed it. I have not used MacroFactor, but I am a huge fan of the team behind it. The Stronger by Science guys, or like Eric Trexler, Greg Knuckles. That was embarrassing. And that crew.

I have massive, like I trust them implicitly. And so I know that the app would also be phenomenal. And I have a few clients that have used it and have spoke very highly of it. So Carbon or MacroFactor, they are paid monthly or they have like an ongoing subscription because you are getting that higher level of coaching. It's not a coaching from a person that's coaching from AI, but for just sheerly adjusting your calorie intake and your macros, like that's pretty base level stuff. And so they can help you with that.

But yeah, if you don't wanna track, that's fine. But if you don't wanna track your calories, I'm not sure why you're still listening. But if you do wanna track your calories, I hope that has given you some idea of which apps you should be looking at and where you could at least start. And so like I said, these are just apps that I personally use. I of course don't have any affiliation with any of them. When I did use paid apps, I paid for them. I've paid for Chronometer, I've paid for Carbon. I'm sure that none of the development teams know I exist. So this is all just.

my completely impartial, unbiased experience with those apps. But I hope that helps. If you've got questions about apps, as always, sneak me a DM on Instagram and I'll hope. Otherwise, I'll chat to you next time.