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FoodNoms makes calorie tracking pleasant

  For the longest time, I tracked my food with MyFitnessPal. It was a utilitarian app that, while extremely proficient at its primary task, it…

foodnoms-app

For the longest time, I tracked my food with MyFitnessPal. It was a utilitarian app that, while extremely proficient at its primary task, it wasn’t much of a looker. It lacked native iOS features that made it never feel truly at home. I lapsed in my tracking, and when it was time to pick it back up again for my self well-being, I looked for an alternative, and decided to try out FoodNoms. It’s a food tracking app as delightful as its name.

FoodNoms starts its relationship with you by being upfront. It lets you know about any data that is collected and how data is stored. Don’t worry, it only collects anonymized crash data and all your health data is stored in iCloud and Apple Health — both totally secure. It then asks for some reciprocal information from you, such as why you are using the app. It can be losing, gaining, or maintaining your weight, adjusting your diet for low carbs, high protein, or keto, or to practice fasting or improving your health. That should encompass most reasons one would use a food tracking app.

You can set your nutrition goals for yourself after that, or you can allow FoodNoms to step in and generate them for you. Considering I’m no doctor or nutritionist, I let FoodNoms do its magic here. Enter some info such as age, gender, and weight, and boom. By the way, each time FoodNoms asks for info such as this, it has a little button to tell you how that information is being used. Peace of mind, I love you. After all this it spits out your personalized goals including your calorie, protein, carb, and fat budgets for each day.

foodnoms-app-screens

Now that you’ve slogged through the requisite setup phase, you get to experience the app itself. The app brilliantly matches the system dark or light appearance and uses some nice colors to differentiate your different macros. You can go back and view different days as well as your progress towards your goals. If the default goals aren’t enough, you can add additional ones for macros like calcium, iron, sugars, cholesterol, etc.

Adding food is easy, including offering the ability to scan labels or search a comprehensive database. Anything you select pulls up a laundry list of nutritional values and you can get precise in how much you’ve consumed. Favorites and suggestions appear and they get more accurate the more you use the app. For die-hard users, you can create your own recipes to be stored in the app.

Aside from integration into iCloud and Apple Health, FoodNoms also now supports iOS 14 widgets which look great on your Home Screen and let you view various different graphs of your tracked nutritional values. Easier than ever to track your food, and see if you have enough calories left in the day for that extra bite of cake...

FoodNoms itself is free — free, free, free. But, if you want to thank the devs and get more features, there is a paid tier. Aptly named FoodNoms Plus. for $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year, you get additional tracking (for water, caffeine, and alcohol), weekly and monthly charts, intermittent fasting goals, estimated portion sizes, and additional stats.

But enough about other people's apps.

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