Lately I've been looking at ways to make a food diary of some kind. I started out on paper but I don't always have my notebook and I often didn't remember to make an entry at the end of the day (or I don't remember what I ate, etc). So, a phone app seems like the way to go. The problem is most food tracking apps are focused on weight loss and counting calories. I don't mind knowing how many calories I ate per day but I'm working on accepting myself and not judging my weight and such. Right now my problem is not eating enough/regularly along with probably needing more protein and nutrients because of primarily eating mac n cheese and pizza and stuff. Executive dysfunction combined with Mystery Gut Issue combined with slightly disordered eating habits. So I'm turning to kintsugi for recommendations, if anyone has a food tracking iOS app they use and like! I need: Easy to use and remember Preferably a place to add notes like whether I got nausea so I can try and tell what caused what Tracks nutrients/protein beyond just calories Allows you to turn off "goal" calories/doesn't tell you you've eaten too much/doesn't talk about weight
My roommate swears by myfitnesspal, and it seems to be working very well for them, as they've been meeting their goals by using it to count calories and track carbohydrates. I'm not a super big fan of it because you have to input all of the actual nutrition information for each food item yourself, and I don't always have that information at hand, or the ability to estimate. I too would be very interested to hear other people's strategies.
You can actually search a lot of things for my fitness pal, including restaurant menus and such. Also it has a bar code scanner. The only time my mom has to put in the info for things is when she cooks, but even then you just search and put in the amounts. (And you can save recipes. I think the hardest part of that is figuring out a serving size lol) My mom swears by it too, and it is good for tracking what you eat. I just don't know if there's too much losing weight focus, because I do think you're supposed to put in a goal? edit: holy typos batman
I'm not sure if MFP has a way to turn off "goal" calories, but it was handy for me when I was trying to track what I ate to train myself back into eating enough every day (woo for depression-based eating apathy). The app reminds you to to punch in what you've eaten and congratulates you for every five days of logging.
i was really happy with a thing called Eat Watch for the Palm Pilot ... many years ago. I know I had one more recently that I used for a while, but I don't remember what it was called. Something like "Tap & Track", but it was good about letting you define specific things so you could just click button and have thing recorded. But yeah, they're all sort of assuming you're trying to change weight.
I'm coming to this thread from about the exact opposite perspective: the food diary app I've been using isn't calorie-counting oriented at all...because it's geared towards tracking GI symptoms...but it doesn't have any nutrient-tracking-features, either...because it's geared towards tracking GI symptoms. It's called Cara, and it comes with twelve tracking categories, as follows: Food (track when you've had meals, take photos, tag ingredients) Digestion (track levels of gut pain and bloating) Stool (i.e. the Bristol stool scale) Skin Workout Sleep Mental (track levels of stress, tag mood) Pain Medications Notes Period Additional symptoms I haven't actually tried all of those tracking categories, so I don't know how all of them work. You can choose how many of them you want the app to display. Anyway, so in theory the app helps you correlate your gut pain and other symptoms with the ingredients in the meals you eat, or else with your stress level, or else with how long you sleep, or whatever. So there's no goal built into the app besides "keep tracking every day, also the more separate entries you add the more Points you get". But I can't think of a way to hack it so that it could tell you anything related to nutrient-tracking. Like, everything it tracks comes back down to how it correlates with your GI symptoms... ...But, uh, the point being. Cara's an symptoms-focused food diary app. There are other symptoms-focused food diary apps out there...like, if you search "IBS" in the App Store...maybe one of them might be able to accommodate nutrient tracking also? They're not losing-weight/counting-calories-focused, at least. (Side note: the most important feature of Cara for me is that it lets you take photos of your meals in-app, save that as your meal entry, and then come back to that entry later to tag it with the actual ingredients. I had a lot of trouble keeping up with food tracking before I realized that I could save all the ingredient-tagging work for the end of the day, using the photos I'd taken as reference for what I'd eaten...I don't know if there are any apps that don't let you do that, but if there are, then I'd have to recommend Cara over any of them, by default, I think.)
Thanks for the suggestions, everyone! An update: I tried my fitness pal for a couple days and it's working ok so far. Interestingly enough, I learned I'm getting about half as many calories per day as I thought. I thought I was getting at least 1200. I might dual wield with Cara or another ibs app to track ingredients and reactions
