Blood Glucose Trackers, Food and Exercise Logs, and More

Lose It!

Apple rating: 4.8

Android rating: 4.1

Free, with in-app upgrades available

Lose It! is a calorie-counting and food-tracking app focused on helping you achieve your weight loss goals. Once you set your weight loss goals in the app, you can track your diet, food, and exercise to lose weight. With Lose It! you can easily track the nutrition, macros, carbs, and calorie intake of the foods you eat.

The premium version of the app offers more targeted goal setting as well as custom diet plans and community support. The annual premium membership is $39.99, or you can buy a lifetime premium membership for $149.99.

MyFitnessPal

Apple rating: 4.7

Android rating: 4.3

Free, with in-app upgrades available

MyFitnessPal is one of the most popular health apps around. “[It] offers significant functionality for tracking, so you’re able to locate lots of products with accurate nutrition info,” Gradney says. With MyFitnessPal, you can log many restaurant foods or even use a barcode scanner to quickly look up foods at a store or in your pantry. It also doubles as an exercise tracker, giving you space to log your physical activity and syncing with many exercise-tracking devices. Upgrade to MyFitnessPal Premium and you’ll unlock more features, such as a food analysis tool that reveals which foods rank highest in nutrients you want to keep an eye on and guided fitness and nutrition plans to achieve your goals. (The current premium subscription price is $19.99 per month or $79.99 per year, but you can try it free for one month.) A similar option is CalorieKing, which is free on Google Play and at the App Store (though it has lower ratings).

Carb Manager

Apple rating: 4.8

Android rating: 4.7

Free, with in-app upgrades available

This app tracks carbs, as well protein, fat, and calories, with a database of foods and a bar code scanner. You can log your meals with photos and voice memos. It lets you set and track a weight loss goal, as well as log exercise, though syncing with fitness trackers requires an upgrade to the subscription service. Note that this app includes features for those following a low-carbohydrate diet, a ketogenic diet, or intermittent fasting. Jeniece Ilkowitz, RN, CDCES, a research nurse at New York University Langone Health in New York City, notes that these diets aren’t appropriate for everyone: Be cautious about taking dietary advice from an app, and check with your primary care doctor, endocrinologist, RDN, or CDCES before making changes to your diet.

The free version offers a food diary, macro tracker, calorie counter, weight log (charting both weight loss and body mass index), and exercise tracker, but adding the subscription service allows you to track blood glucose and insulin values. (The current subscription price is $8.49 per month or $39.99 per year.)

Figwee Visual Food Diary (Android)

Apple rating: 4.7

Android rating: 3.4

Free, with in-app upgrades available

Do you know what standard portion sizes look like? Unless you measure your meals, chances are you’re logging inaccurate portion sizes. Figwee takes the guesswork out of tracking your meals, and gives you a more accurate sense of your intake, by allowing you to view photos of incremental portion sizes. Just search for the food you want to log, pick the photo that matches what you ate, and move the slider on the photo up or down to adjust the portion until you see the right amount. Then tap to add it to your food diary.

You’ll also see nutrition info (calories, fat, carbs, cholesterol, etc.) for the portion you ate. “This can help many patients when they’re out eating in a restaurant to understand how many carbohydrates they’re eating based on what’s been served,” says the Miami-based registered dietitian Amy Kimberlain, CDCES, a national spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Upgrade to the paid version for more features, like an activity tracker, custom food builder (if you can’t find your food in their database), desktop integration, and zero ads. (The current subscription cost is $7.99 per month.)

Calorie Counter by FatSecret

Apple rating: 4.7

Android rating: 4.6

Free, with in-app upgrades available

The food-tracking app from FatSecret is the one that Kimberlain uses most often with her patients. “I don’t recommend the name, but the capability is why I use it,” she says. It enables you to track your food (use a barcode scanner, input foods manually, or snap a photo), exercise, and weight, and share that info with your healthcare provider with a link via email. “[Then] I can make comments and suggestions based on what is entered,” Kimberlain says. The app also includes a journal feature so you can keep tabs on your progress, as well as a recipe library with plenty of healthy meal ideas.

For even more features, like advanced meal planning and dietitian-crafted meal plans to suit a variety of diet preferences, upgrade to the premium version for $6.99 per month.