Which Keto Tracker App is Right for You?

Which Keto Tracker App is Right for You?

by | Aug 16, 2019 | Features | Self Tracking, Product Review

The ketogenic diet has gone mainstream, and with it, so have the number of apps available to efficiently track your progress. But finding the right keto tracker app can get complicated and confusing quickly. There are big differences between free tracking apps with basic functionality and premium apps offering a broader range of keto diet tracking plus other useful features that help you more easily monitor and manage your overall health, no matter what your goals.

So here are some useful tips to help determine if a free keto tracker app is right for you, or if you may want a little more ‘spice’ in your ‘keto app sauce.’

The Freebie Options

MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal is a popular calorie counter web and mobile app for tracking fitness and food intake. This keto tracker app diary feature couples with the calorie counter to help track every calorie, nutrient and vitamin you consume. The macros feature helps you analyze eating patterns to determine where you may be out of balance so you can make necessary adjustments to stay on track with your goals.

  • The Pros: MyFitnessPal is convenient to use with easy access to a huge database of foods and information, offering instant feedback and flexible diet plans. It also integrates with other health dashboards as well as a host of other activity, fitness and lifestyle apps as well as wearables (see all integrations). 
  • The Cons: The food database has many listings that are not verified, which can make it hard to find the right food in their system. There is also more emphasis on calories versus macros, and for some, not having net carbs displayed without running a script can make it less keto-friendly than other keto tracker apps. The app also requires an internet connection to access the database in real-time. It may be best suited for those who are steadfast in their dedication to calorie counting as the best method to reach their goals. 
  • Cost: Free; in-app purchases on Apple watch
  • Platforms: Web app and mobile app on Apple & Android
MyFitnessPal Diary
Carb Manager App
Carb Manager App

Carb Manager

The Carb Manager Low-Carb Diet Tracker is a great option to track your keto diet macros. You can log meals using photos, search, voice input or barcode scanners, making it flexible and user-friendly no matter what method(s) you prefer. The database of foods, although size is uncertain, seems large enough to accommodate most dieters, and you have access to meal planners, diet forums, recipes, eBooks and more. Total and net carbs are verified instantly and the user interface is simple.

  • The Pros: As another free keto tracker app option, this one is full-featured and easy to use, and lets you enter your own carb limits and track water intake. The database of foods is plenty big, you have access to a plethora of relevant diet resources, and it’s applicable for Keto, Atkins, Paleo and other diet plan preferences that espouse a similar low-carb lifestyle approach. You can also chart your body mass index (BMI), weight and progress against your personalized goals, access via the web or mobile device and use unlimited logging for taking food pics. 
  • The Cons: Although free, you may reach a food limit on what you enter before being required to upgrade, and is sometimes challenging to search for and upload their own food items from a personalized meal plan. The user interface is also a bit lacking compared with some of the other nutrition apps covered here.
  • Cost: Free with in-app purchases
  • Platforms: Web app, mobile app on Apple and Android

Lifesum 

Lifesum is another food and fitness tracking app available on mobile devices only (no web app) that offers calorie tracking, recipes and nutrition tips. This keto tracker app offers some recipes along with social media integration and gamification that allows users to connect with friends to challenge, motivate and inspire each other. The app’s food rating guide also makes it easy to quickly assess the foods with the best nutritional value versus those that are high in calories, saturated fats, sodium or sugar.

  • The Pros: Track meals and physical activity through an easy user interface and select your health goals from three simple options, “be healthier,” “lose weight,” or “gain weight.” It includes some recipes and a filter to find and track foods based on what’s popular in your area.
  • The Cons: The food database is much smaller than MyFitnessPal and some of the nutrient information is inaccurate. Significant features such as the full food database and the larger catalog of recipes also require a paid upgrade. 
  • Cost: Free with in-app purchases for additional foods and recipes
  • Platforms: Mobile app available on Apple and Android
Lifesum App

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Total Keto Diet App

Total Keto Diet

The Total Keto Diet app offers a wide variety of healthy recipes for people on the keto diet plan, as well as a host of educational articles on the ketogenic lifestyle in general. You can select and save your favorite meals and recipes and from that, create a personalized shopping list. Users can share recipe ideas with other users. The keto tracker app also includes a macronutrient tracker, helping you log carb intake and overall diet macros.

  • The Pros: This is an easy and convenient way to keep track of your keto plan, weight-loss progress and offers an easy spot for keto education and logging of shopping lists.
  • The Cons: For users that may want to incorporate tracking other health metrics, through integration with other devices or apps, this may simply be too basic of an option to do everything on your wishlist. It’s also difficult to adjust the amount of specific food entered (i.e. entering ½ cup of cooked cauliflower).
  • Cost: Free 
  • Platforms: Mobile app available on Apple and Android

When FREE Falls a Little Too Short

Keto Diet App

When you’re ready to step into the paid keto app world for more robust features, The Keto Diet app offers more to help users adopt a healthier lifestyle rather than just losing weight at any cost. For people interested in using the ketogenic plan to follow a low-carb eating plan with a high degree of accuracy, this is a great choice. Its intuitive diet planner lets you create a custom profile using options from hundreds of meals and snacks. Beyond calorie counting and carb monitoring, this keto tracker app helps you more easily track your ketogenic diet macros, and you can set your carb intake, pull from hundreds of free recipe ideas and use its built-in keto calculator. The virtual shopping basket also helps simplify grocery shopping.

  • The Pros: This app is big on both accuracy and data privacy, so your personal info is secure, and all of the tracker’s nutritional details are from verified sources. Its simple interface is user-friendly, and the diet guide is well-suited for beginners and advanced keto dieters, with thousands of delicious recipes that are formulated for keto via a whole-foods lens. 
  • The Cons: Although the app is user-friendly, it is sometimes considered time-consuming to use. Measuring options for some items are only in ounces or grams, not cups, tablespoons or teaspoons, so volume accuracy can be a challenge on-the-fly.
  • Price: $8.99 per month with in-app purchases
  • Platforms: Apple and Android
Keto Diet App

Heads Up (formerly Heads Up Health)

Heads Up (formerly called Heads Up Health) takes ketogenic diet tracking to a different level and is a more robust personal health app designed to give users an easy way to see all of their important health metrics in one place, whether the goal is weight loss and changing body tape measurements, chronic disease management, athletic performance, biohacking or general health and well-being. 

This keto tracker app integrates with a growing number of popular fitness apps, diet trackers and wearables, such as MyFitnessPal, MyMacros+, Fitbit, Apple Health, Cronometer, BioStrap, Oura Ring and KetoMojo, with more being added. In fact, whatever keto tracker app you decide to use, Heads Up is a great complement to seeing the big picture of your health.

  • The Pros: Heads Up lets users track a much broader range of health and medical data to monitor total lifestyles, while still tracking specific diet plans such as keto. A wide range of popular integrated apps and wearables automatically sync, and the dashboard can be customized to feature the most important stats you need to monitor most often. The Care Team Access feature allows users to share health data with loved ones and medical practitioners if desired, and remove access at any time. Data privacy practices are in place to make sure all your personal and medical information is secure.
  • The Cons: For users that only want to only track a specific diet or food plans such as Keto, Paleo or Low-Carb, the app may have more features than needed.
  • Price: Free 30-day trial / $8.99 per month 
  • Platforms: Web app, mobile for Apple and Android
Heads Up Health App

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https://app.headsuphealth.com/users/sign_up

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The Bottom Line

The list of keto diet tracking apps is wide and long, and clearly, there is a lot of overlap between options, especially when it comes to the free ones. The pack begins to separate when you get into the more robust paid options that offer a deeper, feature-rich experience. So the best way to choose…?  Start with the end in mind. If it’s a diet plan and you’re on a budget, free is the way to go. But if you want to monitor more health stats over the short and long term, then upgrading to a paid solution will be way worth the investment in monitoring your broader health metrics. 

3 Ways to Simplify Your Dieting with a Keto Food Tracker

3 Ways to Simplify Your Dieting with a Keto Food Tracker

by | Aug 13, 2019 | Self Tracking

If your goal for beginning the keto diet is to lose weight, trying to learn the ins and outs of your new diet can be a struggle. Add in all the numbers and ratios, and it can be a bit overwhelming at first. Fortunately, there’s good news – you can simplify the process to make it more easy, convenient and intuitive with a keto food tracker. 

However with the keto diet, tracking your macronutrients (i.e. carbs, protein, fat) is critical – especially in the beginning – to ensure you stay in ketosis (when your body uses fat as fuel instead of carbs) and ultimately ensure your success.

Consistently Monitor Your Food Intake in a Keto Food Tracker

Let’s face it, if something isn’t easy and quick, we aren’t likely to stick with it. That’s why for keto diet followers, convenience and consistency are key. If you aren’t tracking what you are eating, you are likely to drift off course and fall out of ketosis. 

The best way to combat this is to use a convenient app that allows you to easily enter your food intake whenever and wherever you are. Fortunately, the tech-driven world we live in means there is a variety of free (or close to free) keto food tracker apps to choose from. We recommend apps like MyFitnessPal, Cronometer and MyMacros+ to track your daily food intake and ensure you are adhering to your daily goals.

When you start out, calculate your target protein, fat, carb and calorie goals by using a macronutrient calculator designed for ketogenic diets. (You can find a list of calculators as the bottom of this blog. Note: If using a keto food tracker such as Cronometer, the keto calculator is built-in.) Once you have your target numbers, simply enter them into the app. This will allow you to track your day-to-day progress against those numbers. 

Still not sure how you are going to have time to enter those details as you go? Try entering your meals in advance to help you plan your day and ensure you are not over-consuming in any area of your ratios. This will not only help you stay on course but will simplify the process of trying to remember to enter what you ate during the day. If you need to deviate from the plan, you can easily update it. 

Identify Macros You are Over or Under Consuming with a Macros Tracker

By monitoring the ratio of your fats, proteins and carbs (keto macro ratio), you can ensure you are successfully staying in ketosis. Although this may sound daunting, all of the keto food tracker apps noted above allow you to easily track your keto macronutrient ratios and see where you stand against those ratios. 

Once you see where you are falling short or consuming too much, you can adjust your diet to get the right mix. This takes a bit of work upfront, but it’s an important step in helping you achieve the right balance for ketosis. Once the ratios are entered, you’ll be able to easily see where you stand. It won’t take long for you to reach the point where eating to your target macronutrients is intuitive. Additionally, as you become more advanced with the ketogenic diet, you can adjust your macros based upon your progress to best suit your specific body and health goals. 

Get a Holistic View of Your Keto Journey

The keto food tracking apps give you a good start for tracking your macros, but you will want a more comprehensive view of how your ketogenicdiet is impacting your overall health and success. This allows you to monitor other key areas impacted by the keto diet, such as your blood glucose, blood ketones, blood pressure, weight, measurements, HbA1c, insulin levels, etc. Based on this information, you can adjust your macros and diet to account for the most critical areas of your overall health.  

With Heads Up, you simply enter the food you’ve eaten into your keto food tracker. The trackers mentioned link directly with your Heads Up account, and the calculations for your ketogenic ratio are done for you. You’ll not only know at a glance if you are on track, but you will also be able to compare those levels side-by-side with your ketone and glucose levels, weight loss, measurements, lab numbers and more.

We hope these three tips will help you closely monitor your food intake, keto levels and track your success with ease. If you are interested in making your keto diet journey easier and more meaningful, you can get started with Heads Up for free using the button to the right.  We’ll give you the tools to track all your data and make it simple in the process! 

Keto Macro Tracking

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Keto Lifestyle Transformation – In for the Long Haul

Keto Lifestyle Transformation – In for the Long Haul

by | Nov 27, 2016 | Self Tracking | Stories of Transformation, Stories of Transformation

With the start of the new year, or with any new health goal, many of you will start out strong and ambitious. But, unfortunately, often times, a few months into a new program, many may burn out, stop and regress. Instead, think of your health transformation as a lifestyle change, one you can start anytime, and keep on maintaining for the rest of your life. There’s no time better than now to start putting together your toolkit to keep your new and healthy lifestyle close to you. Our longstanding, adored customer Ginny, is an amazing example of how you can transform your health and your life. With her keto transformation, she has lost 85 lbs since she started focusing on her health and is determined to lose 30 more! Before (Ginny on the right): jean-joanne-may-200303 After: glacier-vacation-09141618 A 64 year old long haul truck driver, Ginny keeps her ketogenic lifestyle close to her even when she is on the road. She has a vast history of heart disease and diabetes in her family and she is determined to beat the odds. She feels that we all need to take our health concerns into our own hands. Here is Ginny’s story in her own words…

Ginny’s Keto Transformation Story

I am a 64 year old woman and a long haul truck driver. Since my early thirties I have been yo-yo dieting and, like many others, have tried every diet ever mentioned. In September of 2015, a friend mentioned to me that she had lost 20 pounds.  I asked her what she was doing and she told me about the ketogenic diet.  It was at this moment that my life changed! I began researching and reading all I could about it and started the keto diet on 2/29/16.
Eight Great Ketogenic Diet Benefits

A low-carb/high-fat ketogenic diet

I want to mention a little family background before I jump into my journey.  Both of my grandfathers and my father passed away in their early forties from massive heart attacks. My mother had several strokes, triple bypass surgery and a heart attack. One of my grandmothers had RA (Rheumatoid Arthritis) and the other died from complications of diabetes. My one sibling lost 2 toes to diabetes in Feb 2015. She had triple bypass surgery in February 2016 and is now dealing with kidney and liver issues. Her doctors are still pumping her with insulin and I cannot convince her to change her eating habits. When I started the keto diet, I was already eating low-carb.  By adding healthy fats to my diet, I was able to reach nutritional ketosis fairly quickly. I did not experience the ‘keto flu’ I had read about. My hunger stopped, cravings stopped, constant thoughts of what I would eat next stopped, and thinking about food 24/7 STOPPED. I could not get over how it was like a switch had been turned off!  And though my initial interest was to lose weight, I soon discovered all of the other health benefits. Making the connection that high levels of insulin causes obesity, I also realized I was addicted to carbs, had problems with leaky gut and was insulin resistant – just to name a few things going on.
Precision_xtra_blood_ketones

Track blood ketones with the Precision xtra

I also suffered for nearly 5 years with extreme foot pain. Two issues, plantar fibromatosis, marble sized knots running the length of my feet, and neuropathy, though not diabetic.  I couldn’t even stand the bed sheet touching my feet at night time. After three foot doctors, a neurologist, hundreds of dollars spent on every kind of shoe out there, pain meds and 1200mg gabapentin a day for nearly 3 years, nothing helped. Two weeks into keto, I noticed less foot pain. Four weeks….pain free! It’s been 9 months now, still pain free. Neuropathy has improved to the point that I no longer take gabapentin or tramadol for pain. Having read many books and listened to many podcasts, I began figuring out how the ketogenic diet worked and that we each need to spend some time fine tuning it to fit our health issues. I used several keto calculators to figure my ideal macros. In the beginning I used MyFitnessPal to track my daily food intake and macros. After a few months I was able to keep track without the app. Though, when I hit a stall, I go back to tracking to see what might be causing the stall. As time went on, I discovered things like bone broth, how foods raise blood sugar, how to measure ketones, and intermittent fasting.
Track your macronutrients with myFitnessPal

Track your macronutrients with myFitnessPal

I use Heads Up Health to track blood glucose, blood ketones, blood pressure, weight & exercise. Being able to manage all this information in one place along with my medical records, doctors, insurance information, medications and all my other health information has been such a time saver! I love that I can tap on a few boxes and pull up a chart of whichever info I want. I feel we all need to take our own health concerns into our own hands. A few years ago, my doctor wanted to put me on statins and when I took him an article and asked him to read it and comment – I got eye rolling.  Just dealing with him (now replaced) and trying to talk to him about following a keto way of living – having him roll his eyes at me AGAIN – well – that did not go over so well with me. I knew then, I had to find a keto supportive doctor – and have. For me reading and listening to podcasts keeps me motivated. Also a lot of interesting videos on YouTube. I discovered Heads Up Health while listening to a podcast and signed up right away. I can’t express how helpful it’s been to be able to gather all my medical info and have it in one spot. I love that I can open the program and see my stats all there. I have begun using Fat Secret to track food and macros and have added a Fitbit fitness tracker. They sync with Heads Up Health – all right on my dashboard. When I had my (new Keto) doctor appointment last, he was quite impressed with all the info I had at my fingertips. Thanks, Heads Up Health! I appreciate the chance to tell my story and hope it encourages others to consider a ketogenic way of living and to make good use of Heads Up Health! Don’t try to do it all at once. There is sooooo much to take in and as we try to wrap our heads around all the new info….it can become overwhelming and frustrating. The longer you stick with keto, the more your body will heal from the inside first. We want to see instant results but it’s important to remember there is more going on inside than we can see. I have read dozens of books, listened to hundreds of podcasts and over and over the same message comes through: Stick with it. YOU WILL see results.

Take Control of Your Health

Thank you for sharing your story, Ginny. You are an inspiration to others who are seeking to take control of their own health. We are glad that Heads Up Health can be a part of your journey and we thank you for your support. For more stories like Ginny’s, head over to the transformation section on our blog. If you’d like to learn more about the Heads Up Health program for health tracking, visit our homepage. And if you’re eager to jump right in and start building your health portfolio, sign up below.

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