Favorite calorie counting app?

I strongly recommend NOT counting calories. It's much more effective to look at your health as a function of hormones, especially insulin. The Carbohydrate-Insulin Model of Obesity - Beyond “Calories In, Calories Out” - 2018

I encourage you to look at doing a low carb or ketogenic approach to improving your health (and a impact on your gout too).

The good news is the only thing you have to track is grams of carbs per day (shoot for less then 20), but if that is too much work you can get a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) which will show you your blood glucose in real time, and all you have to do is keep the line as flat as possible. You will learn with quick visual feedback what foods spike your glucose.

OP asked for a recommendation on a calorie counting app, not for people's opinions on calorie counting.

They stated their goals, and if the goals can be achieved without doing calorie counting... its a efficiency they should be aware of.

Okay well I still wanted a food diary to track things. Because different foods trigger different people for gout I wanted something easy to build a record.

The calorie counting is a bonus and I agree it’s not purely math in math out but I’m more interested in seeing what people use to track what they eat.

I love fatsecret. I tried a lot and used MyFitnessPal for a long time. I prefer fatsecret

As the other commenter said, I recommend not counting calories. I don't necessarily recommend low-carbing (I've done it, it works, but I don't think it should be the first line for weight loss), but I agree that counting calories is not a great strategy.

Here is the thing: you used MyFitnessPal 10 years ago. And yet, here you are again, looking to lose weight. Either you gained the weight back, or you never really lost it the first time. This is a familiar experience for almost everyone who counts calories. Because the thing to realize is that all (reasonable) weight loss programs work, just as long as you keep doing them. But if you stop doing them, you gain the weight back. So the only way to achieve your body comp goals and stay at that level the rest of your life is to figure out a body comp strategy and keep doing it for the rest of your life. And counting calories, for most people, is onerous and annoying and just one more thing to do, and now you can't eat as much pizza and ice cream as you want, and it sucks.

Instead, most people who stay lean for years and years simply focus on living healthy lives. The long term solution for most people isnt going low carb or counting calories or whatever. It is creating a fundamental shift in their identity to "I am a healthy person, who does the things healthy people do." And then by doing those things and spending time with other healthy people, their body comp naturally stays in check.

Honestly, my biggest recommendation for achieving long term body comp goals is to go make lots of skinny friends and hang out with them as much as possible. You'll naturally adopt their habits, lifestyle, and mindset, and the weight will come off without even trying.

On your own, I do think the most impactful thing you can do is track what you eat. But track quality rather than quantity. For this, you can just use a normal notes app, or just a pen and paper. Every day, track how much you weigh, and track what you eat. Eg:

5/16 - 100kg
egg sandwich at home
taco bell burritos
grilled chicken + veggies at home

Then every week, review your weight fluctuations and what you ate. Then with, for example, the taco bell, you can ask yourself "why did I do that, and how can I avoid doing it in the future?" That might mean asking why you were stressed out, suggesting you coworkers go somewhere else for lunch, or leaving your credit cards somewhere difficult to access so you are less tempted to eat out. Over time, you change your lifestyle and habits, and you find you are eating unhealthily far less often.

If you care about the app being open source, I've used Energized: [url]https://f-droid.org/packages/com.flasskamp.energize/[/url]

Worked well enough for me, but my needs are low 👍

MacroFactor is nicex

I use this every day. It's not perfect, but covers all my needs. Barcode scanning is a life saver, though it doesn't work about 5% of the time. Manual typing in bar code works in those cases, which helps

keto was the best thing I ever did.. lost 50-60lbs be just eating. cut all carbs and sugar, weight fell off... and stayed off. I was oddly able to eat 2x times a much. ayce does not like me anymore lol

Counting isn’t for everyone. If it makes you feel extra shitty about some choices, or extra anxious about hitting particular numbers, try to learn the nutrient density of foods you regularly eat and don’t use the app to track things.

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Lose It has been perfectly fine for me, and I use it about half of each year. I’m grandfathered into a 10 USD annual subscription, which I think is a bit silly, but switching over to anything else with an extensive database is overpriced by comparison. They also regularly give me “exclusive offers” to buy a lifetime plan for some ridiculous price.

MFP had a better database but they made their actual app utterly unusable over time. Sadly Lose It is messing with their UI too and frankly I liked it better a few months ago. The war on information density has to end, please.

My friends like MacroFactor.

This being Lemmy I think the expectation is to abhor all subscription services, and for good reason, but I think I’d still get my money’s worth even from an overpriced one if it contains enough food from my part of the world and if its UI isn’t too tedious.

I have an iPhone but thanks!

Thanks! I’ll give this a look

I’ll give this a look too! Thank you!