Best Diet Apps

Lifesum earns the title of best overall for diet apps because it encompasses all aspects of a healthy lifestyle, so you can learn how your diet integrates with other habits to ultimately help you reach your health and fitness goals. It’s also incredibly flexible and works with any diet, from keto to paleo to high protein, or you can choose to start with a three-week weight loss kickstarter plan. 

Your Life score serves as a source of motivation, getting higher and higher as you log healthy meals, exercise, water, and more. If you’re ever in a pinch for meal ideas, browse Lifesum’s database of hundreds of recipes. Lifesum also supports macronutrient and net carb tracking, perfect for those following a keto or another low-carb diet.

Many people shy away from the thought of food logging because it’s historically time-consuming and frustrating. With MyFitnessPal, keeping a food journal is easier than ever.

This app is renowned for its massive food database of more than 14 million foods (which continues to grow!). This database makes food logging easier than ever: All you have to do is scan a barcode (if the food is packaged) or search for the item (if it’s not packaged, like an apple or banana).

Additionally, you can create your own personal food database for foods you eat often. MyFitnessPal also gives you a nice breakdown of your daily macronutrient intake so you can see how well you’re sticking to your goals.

Fooducate aims to make healthy eating easier for everyone, from beginners to nutrition experts. The app’s wealth of articles and tips on nutrition and exercise makes it less overwhelming to integrate new healthy habits into your lifestyle. But this app is more than just an educational platform: You can track meals and recipes, exercise, sleep, mood, and hunger level. 

Perhaps the biggest differentiator about Fooducate is that not only can you track calories, but you can track the quality of the calories you eat—a very important but often overlooked factor when it comes to healthy eating. 

When you scan barcodes in the app, Fooducate analyzes information in the nutrition panels to look for components such as added sugars, artificial sweeteners, trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, MSG, GMOs, and more. Each food you enter receives a personalized nutrition grade (A, B, C, or D) based on your health status and goals.

Comprehensive yet straightforward, Carb Manager tracks calories, net carbs, ketones, blood glucose, insulin, glycemic load, and more to perfectly manage your keto diet. In addition to those advanced features, you can also track basic metrics such as water intake, exercise, and body weight. The app analyzes all of this information and provides reports on how your diet is helping you reach your goals.

You can track more than one million foods in the app’s database, connect Carb Manager to your other fitness apps and devices (such as a Fitbit or Apple Watch), browse recipes and meal plans, create custom grocery lists, and log your food via photo or voice command.

Paleo lovers, rejoice! With Paleo (io), you no longer need to endure hundreds of web searches to find out if a food is paleo or not. Just plug the food you’re wondering about into Paleo (io), and the app will instantly search its database of thousands of foods.

It’ll tell you whether or not the food is paleo, so you know if it works with your diet or not. The simple “Eat This” and “Not This” features make it easy to plan meals and buy groceries so you don’t end up with a cart full of foods you can’t eat on paleo.

Paleo (io) also offers loads of educational content, such as its Paleo 101 Briefing and in-depth blog articles on common paleo-related questions. In addition to the food database, Paleo (io) also has a paleo recipes database. 

As the name implies, Lose It! helps people reach their weight loss goals. The app interface is extremely simple and user-friendly with a focus on calorie counting and weight tracking. When you open the app for the first time, Lose It! will take you through a series of questions about your current weight, age, and health goals. Based on that information, the app creates a plan for you to follow, which includes a recommended daily caloric intake based on your goals. 

Once your plan is set up, you’re free to start logging food. You can do so by searching the Lose It! food database of more than seven million food items, scanning the barcode on your food, or taking a photo of your food with the “Snap It” feature. Lose It! provides daily and weekly food reports that summarize your eating habits. If you track your weight, the app also provides a graph that shows your weight changes over time. 

With over 5 million foods in the app database, a barcode scanner, and a seamless logging component for foods and their weights, MyMacros+ is any macro-tracker’s dream app. You can also create and save homemade recipes that you use often, so you don’t have to individually log each component of the meal every time you eat it. For instance, if you make the same egg and veggie scramble every morning, save the recipe as a custom meal—from then on, you’ll be able to just tap the meal to log all of its individual ingredients at once. 

MyMacros+ allows you to log unlimited meals throughout the day and provides insights on how your diet impacts the goals you established when you first opened the app (you can modify your goals any time). You’ll get the nutritional breakdown of every ingredient, meal, and day. One unique and appealing feature of MyMacros+ is that the logging feature is usable without internet, so if you find yourself eating somewhere without service (such as at a campsite), you can still accurately log your meal.

For many people, meal planning is the hardest part about sticking to a healthy diet. After a long day at work, it often feels so tempting to order takeout or microwave a frozen meal instead of cooking dinner. With PlateJoy, you can halt those temptations before they ever begin. 

With plans starting at just $8 per month, PlateJoy provides meal plans designed by nutritionists and professional chefs, along with organized grocery lists so you don’t have to spend hours trudging through the aisles. 

You’ll start by taking a lifestyle quiz that asks about your taste preferences, health and fitness goals, dietary restrictions, allergies, and schedule. Then the app uses a smart algorithm to create a customized meal plan, from keto to paleo to vegan and more, depending on your quiz answers. Your meal plan will come with hundreds of compliant recipes, and you can add your own favorite recipes to your meal plan, too. You can also sign up for optional grocery delivery with Instacart to save even more time.

The Noom diet prioritizes whole foods, habit building, and psychology to help users accomplish health and weight loss goals. Built on the basics of cognitive behavioral therapy, Noom encourages lifestyle development and nutritional eating, exercise, sleep, and lower stress.

The diet organizes all foods according to a green, yellow, or orange color system based on how nutrient-packed they are. While the diet doesn't restrict any foods (it only notes that red foods should be consumed in moderation), it does build you a weight loss program based on your goals and with the help of certified coaches.

Because Noom notes that it's not a fad diet or a calorie-counting app, it encourages users to focus on long-term health. After completing the onboarding quiz, you'll get a customized plan that's meant to establish sustainable weight loss and build lifelong habits.

Since it was founded in the 1960s, Weight Watchers (now WW) has been a popular weight loss program. While many diet apps or programs rely on calorie counting for tracking, WW has a custom points system, which assigns a point value to every food or meal, and users are given a personalized daily Points Budget. Staying within your Points Budget, WW notes, will help you achieve weight loss.

Before the app version launched, one of the greatest benefits of Weight Watchers was its focus on community support and encouragement. Now available in-app, this same network of coaches is available 24/7 to provide motivation. Like other apps, WW offers a barcode scanner, more than 12,000 recipes in its database, and a logbook of restaurant meals for easy tracking.