You may be looking to better track your dietary habits. Or even just check out what exactly your diet habits actually are, you have PLENTY of choices in the Play Store to get the job done. Some are old stalwarts of the Android market, and there is a constant arrival of new apps to check out.
One option in the Play Store is Fooducate. It’s a freemium-type of nutritional tracker app. It’s designed to allow you count calories, track diet trends, and steer you to better weight management.
The free part of Fooducate is a comprehensive food library, diary, and calorie tracker. You are probably well-aware of the premise here: Fooducate first establishes your caloric needs by having you input your basic bio metrics: height, age, sex, current weight, and goal weight. Using these, it calculates a target of daily calories for you to aim for.
Welcome screen
Settings slide-out
Your home screen
Daily logging of your food
You aim for this by logging what you eat at each meal. This can be done a couple different ways. You can search the database of app-provided and user-uploaded food options, adjust the amount consumed, and add it to your diary.
Another option is a visual scanner, where you can scan UPC codes to quickly gather nutritional stats and uploading to your diary.
As you move through your day and multiple days, Fooducate tallies your calorie totals and shows your trending numbers both numerically and graphically.
If you want to know more about the nutritional quality of your dietary choices, this unfortunately is the free road ends, my friend. Fooducate does offer several premium subscription options; the main one being the “Pro” version, which will give you insight on your intake of protein, carbs, fiber, vitamins, etc.
You also get more specific training with specific/trending diets such as Paleo, non-GMO, low-sodium, and such. Pro also gives you space to log more specific metrics like body measurements, blood pressure, and others. Along with ad-free, of course.
There’s also a few other subscriptions available, including gluten and food allergy tracking, a 10-day “Diet Kickstart” (coaching), and even a pet food tracker & guide (who knew?).
Pro ain’t cheap.
Gluten & allergy option
Kick-start your diet
Pet premium?
If you choose to go with the premium options, they may be higher than you might be ready for. Example: the Pro version runs from $4.99 for a month-by-month plan, all the way to a lifetime subscription for $74.99 (!).
Of course, the value of these features is arguable and highly dependent on how much you use it over the the length of your subscription time. Your mileage may vary, as they say.
News feed.
Back on the free side of the app, Fooducate also offers an active community of users who post and comment, a-la a mini social network. There is also “Diet Tidbits” section. This provides all kinds of news and tips-and-tricks articles for you to peruse and read to your heart’s content.
You can also log into the companion website version (www.fooducate.com) to log in and find/track food intake, which can be helpful if you’re more comfortable with a bigger screen.
Conclusion
With diet tracker apps, the two main factors that drive user experience are 1.) the size of the library/database, and 2.) the interface.
The database in Fooducate is pretty good, almost great even. In my time with the app, there were a few misses in terms of food. But I could also find a pretty darn close substitute.
The FAQ was refreshingly cute.
The interface is okay –ust okay. This is admittedly hard to put into words. But as I was searching, entering, and reviewing my food choices, it just seemed like was was clicking a time or two more than I wanted to be. It wasn’t bad in any way at all; I just got a little impatient with my experience.
Overall, if you’re looking for a food tracking app, you would do well in checking out Fooducate. It’s easy to use, and is coupled with a good interface and comprehensive database. This makes for a good basic & free experience. If you’re looking for more detailed features you can find them here, but be prepared to pay for the privilege.