Week 7

 Best Calorie Counter App

Keeping a food diary can help with the battle of the bulge, and tracking calories has never been simpler. You don't even need a pencil and paper — your smartphone can do the work for you.
A number of apps let users log their meals and count their daily calories using searchable nutrition databases. Many even come equipped with barcode scanners, for easy logging of packaged foods. Research backs up the notion that tracking your food intake can help with weight loss and maintenance. In August 2008, a Kaiser Permanente study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine found that participants in a weight-loss program lost twice as much weight when they kept a food diary compared with when they did not. The average weight loss for all study participants was 13 pounds.

MyFitnessPal

The app takes in information about your weight and weight-loss goals, and calculates a recommended calorie budget for the day. This budget appears on the app's home screen, along with a running count of the calories you've taken in from food and burned by exercising.

MyFitnessPal also saves frequently entered foods to a tab for quick entry, and allows users to save their favorite meals in another easy-to-search spot. A pie chart shows an estimated breakdown of the number of calories you've consumed from carbohydrates, fats and proteins. These breakdowns are then compared to the user's diet goals for each. Both daily and weekly charts are available. A nice bonus is the notes section, where users can write anything about their food or exercise that day — perhaps a reminder of how eating a particular food made them feel, or what effect a certain exercise had on their mood.