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Monday, February 23, 2015

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Best Calorie Counter App

eeping a food diary can help with the battle of the bulge, and tracking calories has never been simpler. You don't even need a pencil and paper — your smartphone can do the work for you.
A number of apps let users log their meals and count their daily calories using searchable nutrition databases. Many even come equipped with barcode scanners, for easy logging of packaged foods. Research backs up the notion that tracking your food intake can help with weight loss and maintenance. In August 2008, a Kaiser Permanente study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine found that participants in a weight-loss program lost twice as much weight when they kept a food diary compared with when they did not. The average weight loss for all study participants was 13 pounds.
"It's the process of reflecting on what you eat that helps us become aware of our habits, and hopefully change our behavior," Dr. Keith Bachman, a Kaiser Permanente Care Institute Weight Management Initiative member, said in a statement at the time.
Of the myriad apps that track food intake, our favorite is MyFitnessPal(Free, iOSAndroid). This comprehensive, fitness-tracking app has as many or more features in its free version than any fitness app, and its food diary is particularly well-designed. The app takes in information about your weight and weight-loss goals, and calculates a recommended calorie budget for the day. This budget appears on the app's home screen, along with a running count of the calories you've taken in from food and burned by exercising.
From the home screen, users can click on the day's budget to be taken to a page showing a diary of the food eaten so far that day. To enter foods, users can search the app's nutrition database, create custom foods or just add a quick calorie count based on real-world calculations. A barcode scanner is included for the quick entry of the nutritional facts of packaged foods.
One of the best features of MyFitnessPal is the app's ability to download recipes directly into the app and get estimated calorie counts. The app will take the recipe ingredient list, cross-check it with its nutrition database, and give an estimate of calories per serving. (Users can check the app's work and alter any calories or serving sizes that need tweaking.) For people who scour the Internet for recipes, this feature is invaluable.

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. A pie chart shows an estimated breakdown of the number of calories you've consumed from carbohydrates, fats and proteins. These breakdowns are then compared to the user's diet goals for each. Both daily and weekly charts are available. 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.
MyFitnessPal has graphs tracking progress toward goals going up to a year or more. The app can set up optional reminders to record weight or foods. Users can also participate in the MyFitnessPal forums, which include conversations on recipes, weight-loss tips and success stories. A blog serves up healthy recipes and exercise routines. Finally, lovers of wearables will like that MyFitnessPal can pull in data from fitness trackers, including devices from Fitbit and Jawbone.

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