I’ve learned more than I ever thought I would by using food tracking apps

I do It is better to eat well and stay fit. But as a mother of three, it’s often difficult to remember what I ate today, or even how much water I drank.

Fortunately, a new list of food tracking apps — often powered by computer vision and artificial intelligence — have arrived to fill the empty spaces in my memory, and nudge me toward a healthier life. I downloaded a few food tracking apps, like BitePal, Hoot, Lose It!, and MyFitnessPal, to better understand the ins and outs of my daily meals. I also spoke to nutrition experts to understand what insights these apps can offer, and what their limitations are.

The overarching benefit of food tracking apps is that they help with awareness and accountability about what we eat, says Meridan Zerner, a registered dietitian in Dallas, Texas. “We’re busy humans, right? Let me take a moment to think about this and be intentional about what I’m eating,” Zerner says. “Oh my God, I didn’t have any fiber, or I didn’t have enough iron. Okay, okay, let me do it differently tomorrow. Let me adjust because now I’ve got some good feedback.”

Zerner says this type of guidance is useful for raising awareness because people tend to reduce their food intake by 20 to 50 percent.

Track time

To get started, most apps asked me to enter the basics: my current weight and height, and my eating goals. All of the apps I tried promised to help me either lose weight, maintain my weight, or even gain weight, depending on what I was hoping to achieve.

Some apps required a subscription for basic features like food logging, and fees were around $35 per year. Other apps let me do basic food logging for free, but additional services like nutrient tracking or precise training tips require a subscription, with prices running as high as $80 per year.

Each app asked me to enter basic information about my body measurements. Some became more specific, asking about my habits, how active I am, what type of diet I follow (vegetarian vs. omnivore), and my quality of sleep. Once I entered all of this, each app calculated the approximate calories I needed each day.

While I was excited to get this information, I was surprised by the range of calorie recommendations across the apps based on my height and weight, which made it difficult to know how many calories I really needed each day.

“All of these apps, when they make calorie recommendations and energy recommendations, are going to have to do it based on an equation,” Zerner says. She says the equations likely won’t be able to take into account factors that vary between individuals, such as hormones, bone size and genetics.

“This is one of the advantages of seeing a licensed registered dietitian,” she says. “We can actually do a resting metabolic rate test to see, ‘Hey, this is exactly your burning rate.’” Sometimes it follows the expected equation, and sometimes it doesn’t.

As my day progressed, I entered the types and amounts of food I ate at each snack or meal, and each app counted calories and told me how much protein versus fiber I consumed, how many total calories I ate each day, and how many calories I had left to reach my goal weight.

A few apps have integrated AI analysis through my phone’s camera, so I can take a photo of my meal, and it will estimate the number of calories per dish. It seems convenient, but there were big differences from one app to another. For example, one app calculated that a bowl of Mediterranean contained about 1,000 calories, while another was much higher, so I had to check the ingredients and adjust the estimates myself.