Ask HN: What calorie-counting app are you using? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What calorie-counting app are you using?

2 pointsdelib4 comments

Since January, I've been using the Yazio app to track my calories, and have lost roughly 30 lbs in the process. That's great! But Yazio is slowly driving me insane. Despite the slowness even on a brand new iPhone, they now have a bug that prevents sharing recipes with others... which is a feature that I use daily.

So I'm looking for an alternative, and the space seems quite crowded (Lose It, MyFitnessPal, MyNetDiary, Cronometer, fddb, ...).

My basic requirements are:

- Allow the creation of custom recipes/meals that can be shared with others and updated over time

- Integration with Apple Watch (so it adds my burned calories to my daily allowance)

- Water tracker

- Good database for European foods

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I've been using LoseIt and I've had a successful six months this year and realized a key thing: linking to Apple Fitness was slowing my progress. Here's why - the app tracks "workout calories" at a very high rate and it was essentially calculating my daily calorie budget back to maintenance calories, i.e. not losing and not gaining. I unlinked Apple Fitness from the app. Check the math from your app, use a TDEE calculator as a reference, a lot of apps and fitness devices over estimate calories burned.

I just realized I follow a single responsibility principle for apps: LoseIt for calorie tracking, Apple Fitness for tracking exercise and Streaks for tracking habits. They're all a tap or two away, no need to combine them for me.

Regarding custom recipes - I've found the search results in LoseIt have enough results that I can judge what I ate and pick something pretty close. Calories on packages of food or published by restaurants are working with estimated averages anyways so my opinion is being exact isn't going to result in more weight loss, for me it will result in frustration and likely I stop tracking. If I'm +/- 100-200 calories for the day, I'm still within the range of losing and this fits more with making changes I can stick with. Not saying others should adopt this approach, just sharing my thinking on it, you do you.

I just add it up in my head. Not perfect but no distractions.

I want to try that eventually, but I feel like I'm not quite there yet with just going on vibes.

Some of my gripes with Yazio:

- It freezes. all. the. time. For an app that I use 10+ times per day that's just not acceptable.

- When I update a shared recipe on my phone, it doesn't update for my wife. The only way to solve this is log out of the app and log back in. When you do this, you realize that not all your settings are saved, so you need to go back and fix those.

- They seem to use some aggressive caching in their UI: For instance, I update the amount of food, swipe back, and still see the old value.

- Can't do anything without an internet connection, not even look at how many calories you have left.

- Newest bug: Shared recipes don't open anymore. Just switches to the recipe screen. When I reported this to them, I got an AI answer on how to create recipes.

There are other funny things: For a few weeks now, you can collect "diamonds" when you track foods. I now have hundreds of these, but can't do anything with them.

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