User Perspectives of Diet-Tracking Apps: Reviews Content Analysis and Topic Modeling

It also includes meal plans, thousands of keto recipes and advanced metrics such as ketones and blood-glucose tracking. There are hundreds of the best apps for tracking food to choose from across various platforms, and the choices can initially be overwhelming, but we’ve outlined the best and most popular. In 2026, prices range from free (for basic functions) to monthly premium subscriptions from approx $5-$25 or one-time purchases from $35-$200 so you should be able to find something to fit your budget with a little research. Ellim lets you create unlimited workout routines on the free tier — no caps, no trial, no paywall.

Make it easy on yourself.

This app didn’t work for me since I’m not overweight. I tried it to give it a chance thinking it was what I was looking for, but it wasn’t. And then found out that NO MATTER what, you can’t get your money back once they have charged the subscription even if it’s on THE SAME DAY. Every time I open the app it pushes its premium service at me. I get that they are here to make money, but seriously, just throw a nonintrusive ad window in somewhere and don’t pester me. These two trigrams would then be added to the trigrams extracted from other reviews, resulting in a total of 744,808 trigrams from 72,084 reviews.

Ellim — Unlimited Routines, Free

best free fitness and nutrition tracking apps

It will keep track of your progress and show you how you’ve gotten stronger over time. There’s even a desktop version so you can see your workouts on a computer screen for more detailed planning. There are lots of ways to find workouts to follow along with, including getting workouts from a wearable like a Garmin, or subscribing to a service like Apple Fitness+ or Peloton. But the standout in this category is one that is simple, free, and well-produced.

MyFitnessPal

This works for routines from screenshots, PDFs, Reddit posts, or any other source. If you run a PPL split with an accessories day, you’ve already hit the cap. Hevy also limits graph history to 3 months and custom exercises to 7 on the free tier. Ellim has no limits on routines, history, or exercises. Hevy — 4 routines, ~400 exercises, 3 months of graph history, 7 custom exercises. If you run a PPL split, that’s already 3 routines — you’ve hit Strong’s cap before you even add a deload week or an accessories day.

How many routines can you create on Hevy for free?

Digital participation of current and future generations is increasing; there is also evidence that mobile apps are a potentially useful tool for shaping and tracking users’ diets [8,14]. By exploring users’ experiences with apps, along with their suggestions and comments, it is possible to better support the apps they need and improve their eating habits, health and diet management, and nutrition-related well-being. Although this study provides valuable insight into user opinions, it is not without limitations.

  • This works for routines from screenshots, PDFs, Reddit posts, or any other source.
  • These devices can track your steps, calories burned, active time, and more.
  • Mobile apps have become an important source of information for their users.
  • We were only interested in English reviews at this point since our dataset contains reviews in different languages such as Portuguese, Spanish, and German.
  • Whether you’re a casual calorie tracker or deeply committed to your weight loss goals, you won’t have to worry about hidden fees or paywalls.
  • I’m on a 122 day streak with it and no longer get hangry, have my weight right where I want it, and hit my macros each day!

Custom foods or meals

Caliber — Unlimited routines but a much smaller exercise library than Ellim’s 3,500+, no nutrition tracking, and no AI routine import. When it comes to features like barcode scanning, recipe importing, and averaging nutrients over time, apps vary. Some include one or more of those features on their free version. If you’re tracking calories because you’re watching your weight, sodium because you’re keeping tabs on your blood pressure, or something else, a single day’s data doesn’t really matter. Finding the best number of topics that would give optimal results required several trials, starting with a randomly selected number of topics until we narrowed down to the model with the best score.

MyFitnessPal is one of the most popular web-based exercise and fitness social media applications available. MyFitnessPal (MFP) helps you keep track of your daily food and beverage intake, calculating all your nutrients, calories, and vitamins for you. This enables you to analyze patterns and find out what your diet is missing or where you need to cut back a little. I started this hunt last year and ended up using MyNetDiary. It has a very good database and tracking functionality for macros. It also has diet plans and recipes that I’ve actually found useful.

Data Collection

best free fitness and nutrition tracking apps

But keeping tabs on what you eat can feel like an uphill battle – meticulously logging each ingredient, calculating calories, and tracking macronutrients can quickly become tedious. That’s where technology comes to the rescue, and finding the right free nutrition app for weight loss can make all the difference in reaching your goals. App developers and companies have recognized the value of user reviews and frequently examine these reviews to improve the user experience. Most mobile health apps are free to use, with the option to upgrade profiles to paid premium options (for more features or personalized advice). The initial free download and use make these apps easily disposable and users’ decision to switch between them is widespread unimeal review [24].

“We do our best to ensure the nutrition information for  foods accurately reflects nutrition information from the product packaging,” says MyFitnessPal’s website. Just keep in mind that activity trackers are often imperfect. And if you’ve included your usual activity in estimating your calorie budget (see No. 1), don’t double count. Keeping track of those factors in your head can be difficult, but I’ve found Bearable to be helpful. You can decide what you’d like to track each day—like how stressed you are, and whether you did your physical therapy exercises—and rate how much that sore back (or whatever) is bothering you.

This selection was made due to their greater impact and ability to influence more individuals. Moreover, these apps make frequent updates to provide better service to their users, support the growing network of users, and avoid technical issues that are usually the subject of user complaints, including those in reviews. Because of these efforts, the apps used in this study were also quite homogenous in terms of their ratings (all 15 apps were rated above 4.1 out of 5). Including a broader range of apps (both in terms of greater variation in ratings and in terms of number of users and downloads) may reveal additional challenges users face when using diet-tracking apps.

Plus, get tips for choosing the best omega-3 supplements for athletes to maximize your training results. Built on the same principles used inside teams like Team Visma | Lease a Bike, the app helps you reach your optimal riding weight while maintaining performance through smart, daily fueling aligned with your training load. Whether you’re building power or endurance, or simply aiming to fuel your ROUVY training sessions more effectively, the right nutrition app can make all the difference. Your AI personal coach for fitness — create custom workouts, track progress, and train smarter.

The best app to track strength training: Hevy

Many of the best nutrition apps for weight loss and performance optimization offer charts and reports to help you fine-tune your diet. Advanced AI-based analysis can identify trends and suggest modifications for better performance outcomes. Peak performance doesn’t start when you clip in – it starts on your plate. From macro tracking to AI-powered meal planning, today’s top nutrition apps help cyclists fuel smarter, recover faster, and get more from every ROUVY session and outdoor ride. Ellim — Unlimited routines, 3,500+ exercises, nutrition tracking with barcode scanning, AI routine import, progress graphs, personal records. Here is a list of free nutrition and nutrition tracker apps that help you eat healthy, choose healthier foods and stay on track.

Topic Selection Process

We don’t take donations from corporations, and our flagship publication, Nutrition Action, doesn’t run any ads. That means that everything we do is fiercely independent and unbiased from any bad actors, no matter how powerful. To help keep this online content 100% free, consider donating today to support CSPI. “Every user submitted food is reviewed by our curation team before being added to the database,” Cronometer explains.

The Skinny on Weight-Loss Apps

That’s odd – I’d try and fiddle with the app from your computer- I find it’s much easier to configure. I redid my goal recently and there were a few settings that I adjusted and it pulls data very accurately. Snacking isn’t just about hunger – it’s a performance tool. The right snacks at the right time can fuel your triathlon-training sessions, speed up recovery and sharpen your edge on race day. Whether you’re smashing through a tough swim-bike-run block or training indoors on ROUVY, this guide has strategic, performance-driven snack tips to help you fuel smarter, recover faster and perform better.