What you eat affects your mood, health, energy level, and other lifestyle factors. It might seem like a pain to track every single thing you eat—from odd snacks to meals—but it's a good habit to log your food consumption. You'll discover new things about yourself and your relationship with food.
The best food diary apps have different approaches. Some focus heavily on your caloric intake, while others serve as a visual scrapbook of your food choices. Take a look and pick what works well for your style of food journaling.
1. MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal is an exercise and fitness-oriented food diary app. You’ll set up an account that features your current height, weight, and your fitness goals.
From there, simply input your daily food consumption manually or with photos or barcode scans in addition to your daily activity and exercises. The app readjusts itself throughout the day to update the recommended calorie intake.
The great part about this app is that it isn’t focused strictly on weight loss. Upon launching the app, you’ll select your intentions of weight gain, weight loss, or weight maintenance. You'll also learn the nutritional value of your food choices.
Download: MyFitnessPal for Android | iOS (Free, subscription available)
2. MyNetDiary
Whether you’re a vegan, practicing keto, or have lactose intolerance, MyNetDiary is an amazing food diary that can still help you to log your favorite meals and snacks. Many other food diary apps simply focus on weight loss; however, this app chooses to focus on diet maintenance.
You can select from a long list of dietary options, including low-carb or high-protein diets, and MyNetDiary will make healthy eating easy. You can even ask Siri to log your meals for you!
Download: MyNetDiary for Android | iOS (Free, subscription available)
3. See How You Eat
See How You Eat requires nothing more than taking a photograph of your last meal or snack. For forgetful beginners, it also includes reminders so you can get alerts during your regular meal times.
See How You Eat limits you to 12 photos a day, so it is limiting if you eat frequent meals and snacks. There are still a few bugs, but the app works well and is a great place to start if you're apprehensive of calorie counting or weight loss food log apps.
Download: See How You Eat for Android | iOS (Free, subscription available)
4. Ate Food Diary
Ate Food Diary is a gorgeous food tracker and journal app that wants to chart the path of all your meals and ask why you ate them. Here's how it works.
You take a photo of whatever you're eating and mark it as on-path or off-path. The "path" is your diet plan, so whenever you cheat or have something you aren't supposed to, mark it as off-path. For each photo, you can add notes and mark why you ate a particular meal: hunger, stress, cravings, and so on.
Do it regularly and Ate Food Diary's path becomes an excellent way to look at the food choices you make and the reasons behind them. This may help to break unhealthy eating habits. You'll also want to try one of these recipe management apps to track your healthy meal options.
Download: Ate Food Diary for Android | iOS (Free, subscription available)
5. MyPlate
MyPlate is a calorie counting app by LiveStrong, which means you get the entire LiveStrong community to push you along in your goals and desires. It’s like any of the other calorie-counting fitness apps; however, it features a clean and minimal interface.
MyPlate asks you to set goals, such as watching your carb or sodium intake. Then it's about logging everything you eat. It’s simple to add various foods by searching from the database of two million items or using the barcode scanner. MyPlate will automatically calculate the calories and nutritional breakdown.
Download: MyPlate for Android | iOS (Free, subscription available)
6. Yazio
While many weight loss apps focus strictly on diet control and calorie counting, Yazio takes a different approach. Yazio focuses directly on calorie consumption along with periods of fasting. As fasting continues to gain popularity, Yazio has developed a great system for helping you monitor your food intake—even in periods of fasting.
You can select from multiple fasting styles, such as by the hour, by the day, or by calorie amount. Then the app will help you to schedule out your snacks and meals. When it’s time to eat, you can either manually enter your meals or scan product bar codes. The app focuses not only on weight loss, but also on building muscle.
This is a fully encompassing free food diary complete with exercise entries and a step counter. You can even integrate the app with Apple Health and your other Apple products so that you’re always ready to document in your food diary.
Download: Yazio for Android | iOS (Free, subscription available)
7. Lose It!
If your main reason for a food diary comes from a weight-loss drive, your best available option is Lose It! This app has been specifically designed to help users lose weight by focusing directly on calorie consumption and community involvement.
By logging your breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a community, the idea of caloric intake becomes much less confusing. It’s much easier to source the weight loss problem when you’re actively participating in the journey with others.
Lose It! offers an incredibly simple system for inputting food consumed. Simply scan your meal with the camera and Lose It! will automatically suggest the best way to input the calories—whether that’s by individual ingredient or by plate.
Download: Lose It! for Android | iOS (Free, subscription available)
You Can't Skip Exercise
Whether you’re trying to lose weight, gain weight, maintain your current weight, or just generally learn more about your eating routines, diet is an essential aspect of healthy living. Once you’re able to master your eating schedule, don't forget that exercise is another essential aspect of personal wellness.
The right type of exercise is important. Constant cardio cycling won't help someone looking to gain upper body strength. If you're ready to take the next step in your personal wellness journey, check out some free fitness apps to help build a regular fitness routine.