I wrote about tracking food in the very early days of the Becoming Elli website. I wrote a blogpost entitled Counting Calories or Eat Less and Move More. At that time, I was using SparkPeople for tracking my food. I stuck with that app because I had a large body of data in it. I had created recipes and lots of favorites. It was easy to use. Five years later, I’m now tracking food with Cronometer.
Unfortunately, SparkPeople closed its doors for food logging. It changed its focus and no longer provided a free tool for tracking food.
Within the past year, I tried logging food on the Fitbit app. It was ok but I definitely prefer tracking food with Cronometer.
Some of the reasons why I prefer Cronometer is that I can see my macros by food item and by meal. The Fitbit app just gave me the macro breakdowns for the day so I couldn’t tell which meal was low or high in protein or fat.
Logging food is easy. I can tag foods as favorites so they are easy to find. It also lets you swipe a bar code on the product and gives you the nutritional information right away.
One thing I noticed with the Fitbit food logger was that it also provided bar code scanning but often misread the bar code. I’d have to swipe the code several times to get the correct food. Cronometer is much more accurate.
The other feature I really like about Cronometer is the ability to import a recipe from a different website. You simply paste the URL into the field and it creates the recipe for you. You can modify the recipe if necessary but it’s so much easier than having to enter an entire recipe manually.
I use the Android version of Cronometer and I don’t know if the Apple version is different. Sometimes, I access the Cronometer website on my computer. It’s easy to use there too.
I’ve been working hard on tracking food for the past six months. I can see very quickly when I’m overeating or under-eating. I also like seeing how much protein and fiber I get each day. It’s a challenging habit to create because food logging takes work. It helps to use a tool that makes it a bit easier.
Let me know what tool you use to track food.
