So, i decided to try to lose a few pounds, mostly for the benefit of my knees and feet. And i saw a nutritionist, who wanted me to track everything i eat for a few days as a baseline. She suggested i use an app called “baritastic”, but also mentioned several others, including MyFitnessPal, which i tried using several years ago.
The killing feature of baritastic is that by entering a code and clicking permissions, i can automatically share it with the nutritionist. But oh my God, this is so much less horrible than my prior experience with MyFitnessPal. Maybe MyFitnessPal is better now, too. But this lets me say aloud “roast duck with wild rice stuffing, white rice, and spinach”, and it gives me a very plausible-looking starting point, which i can edit.
I guess, it’s also a lot more tolerable to think I’ll be weighing and measuring stuff for a few days (that was 8.3 oz of milk on my cereal this morning) than to contemplate doing it on a routine basis.
Anyway, I thought i would share the pain, but I’m also curious about other people’s experience.
I lost a lot of weight this year and decided it was time to track my kcals and macros so I tried out MyFitnessPal, both the free and paid version, and I found it non-intuitive and too clunky for me. YMMV. I know it works for a lot of people, but I’m older, and simpler is always better. Also, I didn’t need all the bells and whistles that come with it.
My daughter, who used MFP, had recently switched to Cronometer and said it was easier to use and more intuitive. I tried out the free version and it worked much better for me than MFP. There were a few features I wanted to use that weren’t in the free version, like Fasting, so I upgraded to the paid version. (At $4 a month for the annual plan it seemed a fair price and it meant I didn’t have to see the ads). So far I like Cronometer, and it works well on my iPhone and runs on my Windows PC. For example, it automatically imports calories my iPhone says I am burning into it’s calculations.
I don’t know about being able to share data with somebody else. If that’s important to you then you need to verify that feature before trying it yourself.
I think the market for Baritastic is bariatric surgery patients. Its most annoying feature is that it gives “helpful” hints and encouraging comments, and maybe a quarter of them only apply to people getting bariatric surgery. So when you sign up, it asks if you have a code from your healthcare provider. Since I’m not planning on using this long-term, and the point is to give a food diary to the nutritionist, this seems like a major convenience.
But if you are looking for apps, consider this one. It’s free, and seems fairly user-friendly.
I didn’t find it totally intuitive, but once i poked around I’m finding it pretty easy to use. I eat a lot of home cooked food, and MyFitnessPal drove me nuts, offering me a choice of 35 prepared chicken dishes, but no easy way to say, “i picked some meat off the carcass from last night’s roast.”
This does, misleading, have a " fast entry" that requires me to enter the calories (and optionally fat, protein, etc.) of an item. But even if it’s not fast, it’s an easy way to enter a homemade item that’s portioned. For instance, i have some cranberry ice cream i made by mixing equal parts whole-berry cranberry sauce with sour cream, and portioning into muffin tins to freeze. It wasn’t too hard to calculate the numbers it wants from the labels on the two containers. So now i can just add " cranberry sour cream snack" to a meal.
It also reads bar codes, and then let’s you edit the amount of the item you ate.
But, as i said, what i really like is that it gives me a not-incredibly-fussy way to get a reasonable estimate for a random thing i speak to it.
I’ve been using My Fitness Pal religiously for the past couple of weeks, really sticking to it instead of off and on like I used to, and am wondering if upgrading to the paid version is worth it. I’d love not to see the ads, but is that the only thing you get? Ideally it would make it easier to “add food,” but I don’t know if it would. I just want something that makes it easier to add food that I’ve eaten and doesn’t have flashing ads.
I’m in the process of loosing some weight. My gf “tricked” me by asking me to do Dukan (zero carbs) with her so she could drop a couple pounds. She stays within a couple pounds of her ideal weight (meanwhile I’m overweight but don’t really care).
Initially I thought I was jus supporting her, bet eventually I realized she was trying to help me. She wants me around for awhile, and worries about my poor diet.
So, we’ve progressed from Dukan to modified Dukan (some carbs, yay). Additionally, I’m skipping breakfast and lunch on Mondays and Thursdays. I walk a dog for three miles everyday if it’s not raining.
I’ve lost 25 pounds (11.3 kg, 1.78 stone). I feel really good! I’m drinking more vodka and less beer (calories) and I’m looking for reasons to walk.
I’m using the iPhone Fitness app, that praises me when I “close my ring” (walk two miles, I think). So if we go out and I’m waiting 15 minutes for my food truck order, I set a timer for 8 minutes and walk. When the timer beeps I have to hustle back to pick up my food.
We don’t count calories. We avoid carbs but allow really delicious carbs when we do eat them. It’s an expensive diet. We’re eating nice porterhouse steaks, swordfish, salmon, sashimi, etc. And Mondays and Thursdays are cool because I fast all day and make a huge salad for dinner and maybe it’s the cannabis, but it feels incredible/invigorating.
I used to use MyFitnessPal a lot for many years. One of its convenient features was being able scan the barcodes of the food items you ate and it would automatically pull up the relevant nutritional information. They’ve recently moved that feature behind the paywall and I’ve not used it much since then. You can still manually search, but there are often multiple entries for each item, many of them wrong.
I would also argue that the user interface for the app has become less intuitive over the years.
Minus the cannabis, this is what i suspect a successful diet would look like for me. But my husband is into low fat and vegetarian. And the cauliflower lentil stew tastes good enough, but i find it kinda unsatisfying.
Baritastic has that. I used it on my breakfast cereals. The cauliflower lentil stew was annoying to enter, and i ended up calling it small portions each of yellow lentil, cooked cauliflower, and potato. But stuff with barcodes is easy. And it did fine with “lobster roll with french fries and cole slaw” and " lamb kabob wrap with fries", letting me edit the quantities of the underlying parts.
I’ve been using Lose It. Its gimmick is that it gives you an editable “budget” for each meal / snack period. Other than that it’s pretty standard. I’ve had good results using it’s barcode reader even though I’m living in New Zealand.
I hate this so much! Why so many entries? I wonder if this is improved if you get the paid version or if you’re still stuck with multiple entries with different calorie counts for the same item? They should vet the accuracy more IMO.
And yes, they took the barcode feature away. That was handy but not a dealbreaker for me.
I do that kind of thing with My Fitness Pal sometimes. When I have a Slim Fast shake, I put the powder and milk separately. MFP doesn’t seem to have an entry for anything but the premade shakes or the powder alone for some reason.
There used to be a calorie counting application called “DietMaster” that predated the iPhone and Internet applications and is no longer available. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any “modern” app with similar features.
It had the standard database of foods, allowed the creation of personal recipes and counted calories like current apps, but had additional features that really made it useful. To begin, it would estimate your daily caloric needs based on your weight loss goal and time to reach that goal. As you entered your actual daily caloric intake you’d also enter your weight and exercise activity and it would adjust your daily caloric goal based on your results and its calorie/weight/exercise algorythm . It also had the concept of a “calorie bank” so if you consumed more or less calories than it specified it would credit/debit to your calorie bank, and you could get more credits in your bank by doing additional exercise. With the bank, it was possible to restrict calories for a day or two to create a deficit and then splurge on a later day with that tasty breakfast burrito.
The key to the whole system was that it continually adjusted your daily caloric requirement based on your results and their algorythm so if you kept your caloric bank balance zero or less, you were guaranteed to reach your goal. It could be no other way.
I don’t seem to have the ability to edit my post now that it’s up, but upon further research I’ve found that “DietMaster” still exists, but they appear to have dropped its most useful and unique feature of the calorie bank.
I can’t seem to edit anything now, but I called DietMaster and they do indeed still have these valuable features, but it isn’t listed on their website.