App Review: Livestrong Calorie Counter

Category: Healthcare & Fitness
Price: $2.99
TiP Rating: 4/5
Version: 2.4.1
Languages: English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish
Seller: Livestrong
Rated: 4+
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 3.1.3 or later
Link to the app in iTunes/iTunes Connect

App Store Description: LIVESTRONG.COM’S Calorie Tracker can help you reach your diet, weight loss and fitness goals by tracking your daily calories and exercise. Lose weight easily by setting your weight management goals and track your calories and progress with our comprehensive online food journal containing over 625,000 food and fitness items.

While it would be nice if food and meal macronutrient amounts were given, the large database and ease of use make this app standout in the calorie-tracking category.

Summary: Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong website aims to get you healthy by eating better and working out. This app syncs with the site, allowing you to track your calories on the go. What sets this app apart from other calorie trackers is the huge database of over 625,000 foods and fitness activities.

Review: Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong website aims to get you healthy by eating better and exercising more. When creating a free account you enter in your vital stats (age, sex, height, weight) and weight management goals.

Once that’s done, you can use The Daily Plate to track the foods you eat, tally up your total calories and grams of fat, carbs, protein and fiber. You can also track exercise and activity — everything from running, yoga and weight training, to knitting, vacuuming and shopping is in the database — to take into your total caloric consideration.

The Livestrong Calorie Counter app, available for iPhone and iPad, allows you to track your food and activity from your iOS device. The app syncs with your Livestrong account, pulling in your details — calorie goals, weight, and food and exercise journal — so whether you’re at home or on the road, you know where you stand.

When launching the app you have four main screens: My Plate, My Weight, Food, and Fitness. From the main My Plate screen you see your summary for the day: your daily calorie goal and assorted energy accounting, and a list of foods eaten thus far, broken down by meal. My Weight allows you to enter your current weight, and shows you a graph of your weight change over time.

Food and activity are entered through the Food and Fitness screens. Finding a food is easy thanks to a huge database of over 600,000 items which encompasses fresh foods, packaged foods, and restaurant items.

Although the database is wiki style where the users add and edit the content, foods in which the nutrition info has been verified are marked with a green check — stick with these for the best accuracy. Physical activities are pulled from a standardized database, and the calories burned are calculated based on your height, weight, age, and sex.

Find the food or exercise you’ve taken part in, enter the amount, and click “I ate this” or “I did this” to add it to your daily plate. Voila! Your Daily Plate is updated to reflect the added or subtracted calories. (Knitting burns 2 calories per minute?? W00t! I’m gonna queue up Real Housewives on the Tivo and work on that sweater!)

Adding things you’ve eaten is easy. Items with a green check mark have been verified so you know the nutritional info is accurate.

For the most part, this is a solid app. My only complaint is that you are not given a breakdown of your macronutrients (fat, carbs, protein, fiber) on the summary page. While you can click on each item for this information, it would incredibly helpful to see your totals by meal and for the whole day.

This would be especially useful for individuals who are diabetic or have heart disease, or on a plan such as Atkins or the Zone Diet which requires certain grams or ratios of macronutrients. For that info, you’ll have to use the website.

Adding activity is easy too. Calorie information is based on your own vital stats.

Overall, this is a straightforward app and it works very well, especially if you’re going with the calories in, calories out mantra of weight management. Being able to track your intake as you’re out and about is very handy.

What sets this app apart from other calorie trackers is its huge database, and integration with the Livestrong website. This app gets my pick in the calorie tracking category.