There is a lot of conflicting information out there about diet, but if there's one consensus it's that self-control matters.
If you're the kind of geek who loves reading about how to get things done, you know that it's easy to get lost in the planning stage: researching to-do list apps, reading about optimizations, and tweaking software. It can all help, but it can also distract you from what needs doing.
Diet is similar: it's really easy to get lost in books and apps without ever creating an actionable plan. With this in mind, here are some apps that will help you stop thinking about improving your diet and start actually doing it. Let's get started.
1. Lifesum
Lifesum is one of the most popular nutrition apps on the market, and the reason you’ll use it is that it’s so simple and quick, allowing you to adopt a healthier lifestyle without spending hours recording each calorie you eat.
The free Lifesum app is similar to MyFitnessPal in that it allows you to log your meals and snacks from a database that includes thousands of brands. And if the product isn’t there, just add it using the barcode feature. It’s a convenient way to help you to track and manage your diet, ensuring you consume the nutritious foods you need each day. You can track the water you drink to ensure you stay properly hydrated, as well. Alternatively, you can try these web apps to track your diet.
Download: Lifesum for iOS | Android (Free, subscription available)
2. Dietbet: Lose Weight & Win!
Put your money where your mouth is. If you can't muster up the internal motivation to lose weight, DietBet will give you external motivation. You'll join "games" of people trying to lose a percentage of their current weight. Meet the target, and you get a cash prize. Miss the target, and your money is gone.
The money is part of the appeal, but maybe even more important is the social aspect: you're committing to a goal with a bunch of other people, meaning you know that you're not alone in what you're trying to do. And even if you don't care about the money, winning feels good, right?
This site can be combined with any of the other apps on this list, and can give you just a little bit more motivation to follow through on your goals.
Download: DietBet for iOS | Android (Free)
3. Eat This Much: Meal Planner
If you already have a diet set up, you still might struggle to find decent meals that fit into it. Eat This Much is an app you can use for that. Just enter how many calories you'd like to limit yourself to over a number of meals, and you'll get a free meal plan that you can customize completely according to your dietary preferences.
Sign up for Eat This Much Premium, however, and you'll get access to all sorts of other features, from calorie tracking to a complete set of meal plans for the whole week and a shopping list that's emailed to you. If you want an all-encompassing approach, dive in and see if Eat This Much helps you. Depending on your needs, there are lots of other meal-planning apps you can also try.
Download: Eat This Much for iOS | Android (Free, subscription available)
4. The Flexible Diet: Another Way to Think About Food
Want another perspective? This website is worth a quick read and offers some tools to experiment with too. The idea is that there's no such thing as "clean" or "junk" foods—just foods made up of particular macronutrients.
Scroll down the page and you'll get access to a tool for calculating your daily body expenditure, which you'll use to determine how many calories you need. Fill everything in and then explore the systems for setting and keeping goals.
5. Diet Point: Weight Loss
Still looking for a diet plan that works? Diet Point is a single smartphone app that gives you access to 130 different plans. Pick one, and a combination of meal plans, notifications, and shopping lists will help you stay on target.
Jumping between diets regularly probably isn't going to help you much, so solidify your goals before diving into an app like this. But once you've got that worked out, Diet Point could help you quite a bit.
Download: Diet Point for iOS | Android (Free, subscription available)
Find a Diet That Works for You
There are so many opinions out there on dieting that perhaps the most important consideration of all is time. If an eating program isn’t easily incorporated into your daily life, you’ll quickly abandon it as soon as the going gets tough.
These apps and tools are a great way to inform yourself and help you find a way of eating healthily that suits your lifestyle so that it becomes a lifetime habit.