Lifesum: AI Calorie Counter

TLDR: If you want an easy user friendly app then keep this as THE FREE VERSION. All of the updates don’t even work properly and the manual log feature is pointless as it doesn’t save. I have used this app on and off since 2017. Every time I want to start a weight loss journey, this has been my go to app. The problem now is it’s no longer as user friendly with premium. I cannot for the life me of figure out how to track a single item. Quick track? Nope. Barcode? Nope. Every option it recommends doesn’t work. I can’t even add the ingredients into a meal to log it the long way around. I add it but it doesn’t reflect at all. It refreshes and disappears. And I don’t have the patience to pull up every food item I use to manually type in the numbers. Maybe a bug? But the list of updates says it’s better than ever. What a joke. Now it’s pushing ai on me to log my meals when all I want to do is scan and add. I don’t want to be forced to talk to an ai just to track my meals. How is this app more difficult with the paid subscription? I paid in advance so I can’t even cancel and use the free version again. Never felt so frustrated. I already downloaded a new app and canceled my subscription since I don’t want to wait 3 months until this app is usable again to lose weight. (I paid 3 months in advance)

Positives: I like the tracking with photo feature when you need to quickly track a meal with a “guesstimation.” So glad the barcode feature is still here! Negatives: there’s a lot of glitches with the new ai update, and things aren’t as streamlined as they used to be. Foods are no longer organized by meal type. It just appears as one long list, and if they’re not tracked in a timely manner they will show up as an incorrect meal, and it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to manually adjust when before you could. You also can’t see calories by meal anymore, which was super helpful in tracking my habits, it’s all just really disorganized now. Tracking with text is not always accurate either, and there’s no way to adjust, or search for verified foods like they’re used to be. I also really wish you could multi select from recent foods when tracking a meal, you have to go back each time and it’s really annoying, I don’t think this was a problem before. Overall: I’m hoping these things are addressed, I used to really love this app. I’m disappointed that Lifesum went the ai direction, the personal touch and accuracy is just not there anymore They fixed something that wasn’t broken and made it worse. I would suggest keeping the photo feature and text entry as an option but still include the old methods. I won’t be renewing my subscription if this doesn’t become more user friendly.

This app definitely has the potential to be a 5 star app but the synchronization of the meal plans and the shopping list is horrible. For starters, the shopping list should automatically be generated, but instead you have to select each item individually for it to be added to the the shopping list. Second, some recipes have the same ingredients but instead of grouping repeat items together and increasing the quantity the app just creates another item on the list for the same thing. For example, there were two meals on the meal plan that both needed chia seeds and instead of having one entry with the total amount of chia seeds I needed for the meal plan, chia seeds were listed twice with 2 different amounts. It’s really a pain in the a*+. Additionally, there is an option to choose to eat the same meal every day for a meal but it does not sync with the planner. When you select to add the recipe ingredients to the shopping list it adds the original item that was there instead. For example, there was originally a recipe for lentil soup and I replaced it with sweet potato stew instead. When I chose to add the sweet potato stew ingredients to my shopping list all the ingredients for the lentil soup show up instead. Overall, I love everything else about this app, but the meal program has not been optimized. I highly recommend the developers to take a look at this app called Meal Lime and take pointers on how they synchronize their shopping list with their meal plans.