Fooducate: Nutrition Coach

This app works great. It tracks calories of course but it does so much more. It tells you about the food you chose in terms of nutritional value and gives it a grade from A-D. It shows percents of daily intake for major food groups like protein, carbohydrates and fats/saturated fats. Also, major minerals like calcium, sodium etc and major vitamins. It tracks water intake, your weight. There’s a place to put your recipes and meals you eat often so you can just choose that and not input several items. It also automatically calculates your calories allowed as you lose weight so you can continue on your path to your final goal. You will get out what you put in. I’ve spent some time every day inputting everything I can think of including workouts and it has worked flawlessly for me. The only thing I struggle with is sometimes when you scan a barcode with your phone, the item is not entered into the system. If that happens you can choose something similar or enter the item you want yourself. Doing that can be a bit of a challenge and sometimes it doesn’t like the pictures I take of the item so I’ve had to give up a few times and just use something similar for that meal.

When the macros are wrong on a food, you have to input the entire thing all on its own. That wouldn’t be such a pain, as other apps do it, but those other apps typically let you copy the same information over and just adjust what you need for your own records. with this one, you have to submit the information with a picture, which is just absolutely ridiculous. It is so inconvenient and waste so much of your time to use this app. The more basic apps will suit you much better if you’re actually doing this on a daily basis. I thought that this app would give me more reports and things that would benefit me, I was wrong. The user experience on this app is very clunky, time consuming, and not intuitive. I honestly don’t understand how this app has such good ratings, unless it’s audience has never used a different type of app. None of them are perfect, but where they are not perfect they make it easy for you to make adjustments on your own without having to wait days for them to update the food for you to get an idea of what you’re really consuming. Other people may not take their diet as I do perhaps, but since I’m putting in the effort to do it anyway I wanna know down to the proper calorie, not have to make estimates or waste time having to do manual inputs because their data is an accurate.

I think I found this app before The Most Popular fitness tracker gained so much traction, and tbh this app is still superior. The UI is so easy for me to navigate, it’s affordable, and the database of food has grown so much. I also love the long list of different types of exercise, and even though estimating calories burned is not an exact science, I appreciate any ballpark number of extra calories that I need to eat so I don’t hurt myself. Seriously, I tried these other, more talked about apps, and I just don’t want to quit this one. It’s not freaky and aggressive in its wording about sticking to diets and militant exercise and cult-like branded phrasing, and the orange, yellow, and earth tone colors are more pleasant. I also love that it gives you a flexible target date, so you can also set your goal based on the number of calories you want to eat per day. (I like smaller calorie deficits.) Also, bravo for the warnings about going below 1200 calories! Keep being responsible, please! EDIT: I just deleted a star because I saw below what data they are collecting. Dude, collect my subscription money. Don’t invade my privacy like this. There is no reason to know my contacts, etc. Also, this shouldn’t be an app for ages 4+. Toddlers don’t need to diet. Kids and teens should not be encouraged to diet either given the statistics on the body dysmorphia and eating disorders they develop for life. Thanks!