Diet Tracker Showdown: MyFitnessPal Vs. Lose It

Whether you’re trying to stick to strict calorie counting or just understanding what nutrients you’re taking in , a good food log app is a must. MyFitnessPal and Lose It are two of the most popular app stores out there, and they are your favorites too. Let’s see how they stack up.

Applicants

There are many diet trackers out there, but these two have long been popular and versatile options. Both options are easy to use, remind you of each meal and give you an overview of your nutrition throughout the day. You can also log and track your weight using these apps.

• MyFitnessPal (free, iOS / Android ) is part of the Kingdom of Under Armor, along with MapMyRun and other fitness apps. It is full of features and easily connects with other devices.
• Lose it! (free, iOS / Android ) is simpler, but still does everything it takes to track your diet. Its most obvious advantage over MyFitnessPal is its fast food entry via photo recognition, so you just have to take a picture of your plate to get started.

Both are free, but offer a premium tier with a lot of features. The MyFitnessPal subscription costs $ 9.99 / month or $ 49.99 / year and offers additional services such as the ability to set calorie goals for different days or meals, export to a spreadsheet, and the ability to track exercise without increasing your calorie target (approach that may be best in the long run ).

Lose It Premium is priced at $ 39.99 per year. It allows you to set goals for various nutrients (such as making sure you are getting a certain amount of vitamins) and allows you to track more goals than just weight, including body measurements and the amount of water you drink each day.

Both make eating quick and painless.

Since you will be introducing food multiple times a day, this task should be smooth and quick. Fortunately, both apps can add products quickly, and there are several ways to do this:

• Choose one of the recently used products.
• Find food in their food database, which includes packaged foods and restaurant dinners.
• Point out that this dish is the same as the previous one (handy for leftovers).
• Add the recipe manually or by pasting the URL from the recipes website.
• Enter a food that is not in the database by copying all the numbers from its nutritional information label.
• Enter only calories for the new dish (good if you have a label but don’t feel like entering everything).
• Scan the barcode from the label.

After using the app for a while, it’s quickest to add recently used products. We all tend to come back to the same foods over time, so once you find or enter your favorite salad it will show up on your list when you try it again next week.

Lose It has a tiny edge over the competition here, with three shortcuts:

• Quick Add: You can quickly enter food without entering all the information, just entering calories, fats, carbohydrates and proteins. MyFitnessPal has the same feature but limits you on calories in the free version.
• Find restaurants by location : If you are sitting in a restaurant and browsing its products, Lose It can use your location to find the restaurant you want without searching. Unfortunately the function didn’t find my local Wendy, so I had to search for it anyway.
• Take a Snapshot : If you take a snapshot of your food, the app will display a series of shortcuts that represent suggestions of what it might be . Click on the shortcut and you will find yourself in the search for this object. This works great for a glass of red wine (let’s say red wine), but not for a chicken dinner. Lose It guessed pancakes, hummus and ice cream; the chicken was not even in the top ten. They say the feature is still in beta so it can be improved. However, I found it handy as a shortcut to find some items. It also stores a thumbnail photo next to that dish in the app, which is a good visual reminder of what the food really was.

We’re going to be announcing this as a narrow win for Lose It, but not everyone will feel the need to use these additional features.

Accuracy is difficult to name

Both apps have an extensive database of products, although neither was completely reliable. For the same 4.5-ounce steak, MyFitnessPal listed 156 calories and Lose It listed 328. (According to USDA, the correct amount is 310, but can vary depending on how it’s cooked). MyFitnessPal was more likely to give a lower score, but it also gave me a lower goal for total calories. MyFitnessPal seems to have more users who complain about inaccurate calorie counting , but that could only be because it has more users overall.

Without more complete accuracy data, it is difficult to tell whether one application is more accurate than another. Calorie counting will never be completely accurate anyway, so treat any numbers with a grain of salt.

Both apps give you target calories based on your age, gender, and weight. Entering the same information, I got a target of 1650 from MyFitnessPal versus 1916 from Lose It. There are different methods of calculating your calorie needs, and none of them are correct, so the truth will be revealed when you figure out what happens to your weight over time. We cannot announce a winner here, but it would be good to know what the discrepancies are.

Lose It Shows You More At A Glance

This is subjective, but I found Lose It to have a nicer interface. There is a small illustration next to the list of each food, so it will be easier for you to scroll through the list and see what you ate at each meal. If you’ve used the Snap It feature, you’ll also see a thumbnail photo of your food.

Lose It also gives you a calorie goal for foods you haven’t eaten yet; MyFitnessPal can do the same, but only in the paid version.

MyFitnessPal is a more complex app, so it’s a little annoying to use if you’re just trying to track your diet. For example, you constantly return to the home screen, which is filled with blog posts. In contrast, when you complete the action in Lose It, you return to the food diary itself.

MyFitnessPal connects to more apps and devices

However, this complexity is the strong point of MyFitnessPal. It is part of the Under Armor family of apps along with MapMyRun, MapMyFitness, Endomondo and more. You can also install UA Record to get a great overview of various aspects of your health on the dashboard.

Lose It can connect to multiple apps and devices ( including Fitbit , RunKeeper, and MapMyRun ), but its choice pales in comparison to the hundreds of MyFitnessPal options.

Both can connect to Google Fit or iOS HealthKit, so you don’t have to give up much if you choose Lose It. But if you use several other fitness apps and want to keep your diet tracker fully connected, MyFitnessPal is the app for you.

Verdict: Lose It Is Slicker Standalone App, But MyFitnessPal Is Better Connected

If all you need is a diet tracker, Lose It has several advantages: a nicer interface and several additional ways to quickly add food. But if you have a few of your favorite fitness apps and devices, MyFitnessPal is more likely to integrate seamlessly into your health tracking life.

Neither app is perfect: both have random errors in the food database and disagree on how many calories you need. If you frequent a particular restaurant, you should check the databases of both apps to see if your favorite foods are there. But in the end, any of them will effectively track your diet.

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