Which Keto Tracker App is Right for You?

Which Keto Tracker App is Right for You?

The ketogenic diet has gone mainstream, and with it, so have the number of apps available to efficiently track your progress. But finding the right keto tracker app can get complicated and confusing quickly. There are big differences between free tracking apps with basic functionality and premium apps offering a broader range of keto diet tracking plus other useful features that help you more easily monitor and manage your overall health, no matter what your goals.

So here are some useful tips to help determine if a free keto tracker app is right for you, or if you may want a little more ‘spice’ in your ‘keto app sauce.’

The Freebie Options

MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal is a popular calorie counter web and mobile app for tracking fitness and food intake. This keto tracker app diary feature couples with the calorie counter to help track every calorie, nutrient and vitamin you consume. The macros feature helps you analyze eating patterns to determine where you may be out of balance so you can make necessary adjustments to stay on track with your goals.

  • The Pros: MyFitnessPal is convenient to use with easy access to a huge database of foods and information, offering instant feedback and flexible diet plans. It also integrates with other health dashboards as well as a host of other activity, fitness and lifestyle apps as well as wearables (see all integrations). 
  • The Cons: The food database has many listings that are not verified, which can make it hard to find the right food in their system. There is also more emphasis on calories versus macros, and for some, not having net carbs displayed without running a script can make it less keto-friendly than other keto tracker apps. The app also requires an internet connection to access the database in real-time. It may be best suited for those who are steadfast in their dedication to calorie counting as the best method to reach their goals. 
  • Cost: Free; in-app purchases on Apple watch
  • Platforms: Web app and mobile app on Apple & Android
MyFitnessPal Diary
Carb Manager App
Carb Manager App

Carb Manager

The Carb Manager Low-Carb Diet Tracker is a great option to track your keto diet macros. You can log meals using photos, search, voice input or barcode scanners, making it flexible and user-friendly no matter what method(s) you prefer. The database of foods, although size is uncertain, seems large enough to accommodate most dieters, and you have access to meal planners, diet forums, recipes, eBooks and more. Total and net carbs are verified instantly and the user interface is simple.

  • The Pros: As another free keto tracker app option, this one is full-featured and easy to use, and lets you enter your own carb limits and track water intake. The database of foods is plenty big, you have access to a plethora of relevant diet resources, and it’s applicable for Keto, Atkins, Paleo and other diet plan preferences that espouse a similar low-carb lifestyle approach. You can also chart your body mass index (BMI), weight and progress against your personalized goals, access via the web or mobile device and use unlimited logging for taking food pics. 
  • The Cons: Although free, you may reach a food limit on what you enter before being required to upgrade, and is sometimes challenging to search for and upload their own food items from a personalized meal plan. The user interface is also a bit lacking compared with some of the other nutrition apps covered here.
  • Cost: Free with in-app purchases
  • Platforms: Web app, mobile app on Apple and Android

Lifesum 

Lifesum is another food and fitness tracking app available on mobile devices only (no web app) that offers calorie tracking, recipes and nutrition tips. This keto tracker app offers some recipes along with social media integration and gamification that allows users to connect with friends to challenge, motivate and inspire each other. The app’s food rating guide also makes it easy to quickly assess the foods with the best nutritional value versus those that are high in calories, saturated fats, sodium or sugar.

  • The Pros: Track meals and physical activity through an easy user interface and select your health goals from three simple options, “be healthier,” “lose weight,” or “gain weight.” It includes some recipes and a filter to find and track foods based on what’s popular in your area.
  • The Cons: The food database is much smaller than MyFitnessPal and some of the nutrient information is inaccurate. Significant features such as the full food database and the larger catalog of recipes also require a paid upgrade. 
  • Cost: Free with in-app purchases for additional foods and recipes
  • Platforms: Mobile app available on Apple and Android
Lifesum App

Try a Health & Keto Tracker App Free

Total Keto Diet App

Total Keto Diet

The Total Keto Diet app offers a wide variety of healthy recipes for people on the keto diet plan, as well as a host of educational articles on the ketogenic lifestyle in general. You can select and save your favorite meals and recipes and from that, create a personalized shopping list. Users can share recipe ideas with other users. The keto tracker app also includes a macronutrient tracker, helping you log carb intake and overall diet macros.

  • The Pros: This is an easy and convenient way to keep track of your keto plan, weight-loss progress and offers an easy spot for keto education and logging of shopping lists.
  • The Cons: For users that may want to incorporate tracking other health metrics, through integration with other devices or apps, this may simply be too basic of an option to do everything on your wishlist. It’s also difficult to adjust the amount of specific food entered (i.e. entering ½ cup of cooked cauliflower).
  • Cost: Free 
  • Platforms: Mobile app available on Apple and Android

When FREE Falls a Little Too Short

Keto Diet App

When you’re ready to step into the paid keto app world for more robust features, The Keto Diet app offers more to help users adopt a healthier lifestyle rather than just losing weight at any cost. For people interested in using the ketogenic plan to follow a low-carb eating plan with a high degree of accuracy, this is a great choice. Its intuitive diet planner lets you create a custom profile using options from hundreds of meals and snacks. Beyond calorie counting and carb monitoring, this keto tracker app helps you more easily track your ketogenic diet macros, and you can set your carb intake, pull from hundreds of free recipe ideas and use its built-in keto calculator. The virtual shopping basket also helps simplify grocery shopping.

  • The Pros: This app is big on both accuracy and data privacy, so your personal info is secure, and all of the tracker’s nutritional details are from verified sources. Its simple interface is user-friendly, and the diet guide is well-suited for beginners and advanced keto dieters, with thousands of delicious recipes that are formulated for keto via a whole-foods lens. 
  • The Cons: Although the app is user-friendly, it is sometimes considered time-consuming to use. Measuring options for some items are only in ounces or grams, not cups, tablespoons or teaspoons, so volume accuracy can be a challenge on-the-fly.
  • Price: $8.99 per month with in-app purchases
  • Platforms: Apple and Android
Keto Diet App

Heads Up (formerly Heads Up Health)

Heads Up (formerly called Heads Up Health) takes ketogenic diet tracking to a different level and is a more robust personal health app designed to give users an easy way to see all of their important health metrics in one place, whether the goal is weight loss and changing body tape measurements, chronic disease management, athletic performance, biohacking or general health and well-being. 

This keto tracker app integrates with a growing number of popular fitness apps, diet trackers and wearables, such as MyFitnessPal, MyMacros+, Fitbit, Apple Health, Cronometer, BioStrap, Oura Ring and KetoMojo, with more being added. In fact, whatever keto tracker app you decide to use, Heads Up is a great complement to seeing the big picture of your health.

  • The Pros: Heads Up lets users track a much broader range of health and medical data to monitor total lifestyles, while still tracking specific diet plans such as keto. A wide range of popular integrated apps and wearables automatically sync, and the dashboard can be customized to feature the most important stats you need to monitor most often. The Care Team Access feature allows users to share health data with loved ones and medical practitioners if desired, and remove access at any time. Data privacy practices are in place to make sure all your personal and medical information is secure.
  • The Cons: For users that only want to only track a specific diet or food plans such as Keto, Paleo or Low-Carb, the app may have more features than needed.
  • Price: Free 30-day trial / $8.99 per month 
  • Platforms: Web app, mobile for Apple and Android
Heads Up Health App

Try a Health & Keto Diet Tracker Free

https://app.headsuphealth.com/users/sign_up

The Bottom Line

The list of keto diet tracking apps is wide and long, and clearly, there is a lot of overlap between options, especially when it comes to the free ones. The pack begins to separate when you get into the more robust paid options that offer a deeper, feature-rich experience. So the best way to choose…?  Start with the end in mind. If it’s a diet plan and you’re on a budget, free is the way to go. But if you want to monitor more health stats over the short and long term, then upgrading to a paid solution will be way worth the investment in monitoring your broader health metrics. 

Top PaleoFX Products From The 2016 Conference

Top PaleoFX Products From The 2016 Conference

In this post I present a list of my favorite PaleoFX products from the 2016 conference. Going paleo is not always easy, especially when you are already sick and using the diet to try and get healthy. What impressed me most about this year’s event was the number of products on the market that make it easier to adopt and maintain a paleo lifestyle.

Equally inspiring was the fact that many of these companies are being built by first-time entrepreneurs, local businesses, husband/wife teams and others who are just following their passion and building their livelihood by providing products or services for the paleo community.

Heads Up Health can help you chart your progress and measure success on your paleo journey. You can get started any time using the button below. Or, read on for our top PaleoFX products from this year’s conference.

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Top PaleoFX Products

Admittedly, any attempt to curate a short list of products from this year’s event will be subjective at best. That said, here are some of my favorite PaleoFX products, in no particular order:

  1. Paleo Valley 100% Grass Fed Beef Stick: After first learning of this product on Jimmy Moore’s podcast, I was finally able to sample them at the show – and they were legit. I bought a 10-pack on the spot and the jalapeno flavor are now officially part of my paleo aresnal.

    PaleoFX products - Paleo Valley Beef Stick

    Paleo Valley Beef Stick

  2. Pilinuts: These nuts contain 22 grams fat/1g carbs/3 grams protein per 1 ounce (28 g) serving, delivering the highest fat and magnesium content of any nut on the market.

    PaleoFX products - pilinuts

    Pilinuts

  3. Jilz Gluten Free Crackers: I’ve scoured my local grocery store on more than one occasion looking for great tasting, paleo-friendly crackers with no success. Jilz fills this important need with a cracker that is gluten-free AND grain-free and made without corn, soy, dairy, wheat or sugar. Hallelujah!

    PaleoFX products - Jilz gluten-free crackers

    Jilz gluten-free crackers

  4. Paleo mayonnaise from Primal Kitchen: Made with avocado oil and organic cage-free eggs, this product provides a paleo-friendly substitute for tuna salad, egg salad or other dishes where the recipe calls for mayo. They also have a chipotle lime version. While not difficult to make on your own, it’s nice to have access to a high quality, pre-made product for convenience.

    PaleoFX products - Primal Kitchen's paleo-friendly mayonnaise

    Primal Kitchen’s paleo-friendly mayonnaise

  5. Dry Farm Wines: Unfortunately there were no samples available at the conference, but this appears to be a paleo-friendly line of red and white wines. The wine is clinically tested to contain less than 1 gram/L of total sugars (statistically sugar-free and carb-free). Their testing reports no impact on blood sugar and no adverse effect on ketone (BHB) production.

    PaleoFX products - Dry Farm Wines

    Dry Farm Wines

  6. Four Sigmatic Mushrooms: Four Sigmatic’s products, including their mushroom cacaos and coffees, are a nice easy hack to get more of the medicinal benefits of mushrooms into your diet. I tasted the mushroom coffee and it was excellent.

    PaleoFX products - Four Sigmatic Mushrooms

    Four Sigmatic Mushrooms

  7. Jambo Superfoods Ghee Butter: This product contains cannabidiol (CBD) oil, which provides the medicinal benefits of cannabis without the psychoactive effects. Made with grass-fed ghee and mct oil, this liquid product would work great with Bulletproof coffee or as a fat for cooking, assuming of course you have the proper prescription or license for accessing medicinal cannabis products.

    PaleoFX products - Jambo Superfoods Ghee Butter

    Jambo Superfoods Ghee Butter

  8. Vital Proteins Beef Liver Capsules: Organ meats are prized for their incredible nutrient density, most notably Vitamin A. These capsules are made from pasture-raised, grass-fed cows and make a great alternative for those (myself included) who are less than enchanted with the idea of purchasing, preparing and consuming organ meats.

    PaleoFX Products - Vital Proteins Beef Liver Capsules

    Vital Proteins Beef Liver Capsules

  9. Spice Cave Seasoning System: I like the simplicity of this all-in-one, paleo-friendly seasoning system. The spices are gluten-free, low sodium and contain no preservatives, refined sugars or artificial ingredients.
  10. Wild Planet and Vital Choice Seafood: These companies were both on hand at PaleoFX promoting their sustainably caught seafood products which they ship to your home. Vital Choice’s sardines with extra virgin olive oil and organic red chili were the best sardines I’ve tasted. Serve their tuna products with Primal Kitchen mayo on Jilz gluten-free crackers and you are officially a paleo SUPERSTAR!

    PaleoFX products - Vital Choice Sardines

    Vital Choice Sardines

Hopefully there’s at least one or two new products in the list that you’d like to try. If you’ve got a favorite paleo product you’d like to share with the Heads Up community, leave us a comment below! If you’re ready to start tracking your paleo progress with Heads Up Health, sign up below to create your free account. Or if you just want to stay in touch, subscribe to our blog or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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Three Reasons Why We Love the Misfit Shine Activity + Sleep Tracker

Three Reasons Why We Love the Misfit Shine Activity + Sleep Tracker

At Heads Up Health, we’re always on the lookout for new technology that can help us better manage our health. When it comes to activity trackers, there’s a ton of them on the market these days. Choices run the gamut from wrist-worn devices like FitBit and Jawbone to mobile apps like Moves, Google Fit and Apple Health. One of my personal favorites is the Misfit Shine. I’ve been using it for over a year now and here are the three reasons why I love the Misfit Shine Activity + Sleep Tracker.

  1. No Charging!

The Shine runs on a watch battery. This battery has a life span of between four and six months, which means you never have to take it off for charging. With other devices, taking it off to charge means you run the risk of forgetting to put it back on and potentially missing out on a day (or more) of valuable data.

MisFit Shine Review - Battery

Runs on a watch battery

  1. Waterproof

The Shine is completely waterproof. You can leave it on while swimming and/or showering. If it accidentally ends up going through the washing machine, chances are it will survive that, too.

MisFit Shine Review - Waterproof

MisFit Shine Review – Waterproof

  1. Automatic sleep detection

Lastly, and most significantly, is Shine’s sleep tracking. Getting enough sleep is one of the best things you can do for overall health and longevity. However, with many activity trackers on the market, if you want accurate sleep data, you need to manually set the device into “sleep mode” before you go to bed and then take it out of “sleep mode” when you wake up. Inevitably you end up forgetting one or the other and the result is incomplete sleep data.

The Shine is able to automatically detect when you fall asleep and when you wake up. Just wear the Shine and you get good sleep data – every night! Figure 2 below shows my weekly data in the Heads Up Health Dashboard to make sure I am staying on track over the course of the week.

MisFit Shine Review - Integrating with the Heads Up Health dashboard

MisFit Shine Review – Integrating with the Heads Up Health dashboard

Misfit Shine + Heads Up Health: Better Together

Connecting your Misfit Shine to your Heads Up Health account lets you get even more value out of the device.

While the Shine comes with a fantastic mobile app, the Heads Up Health web app provides a complementary experience. For example, you can easily look at your Misfit data on a daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly basis to make sure you’re staying on track with sufficient exercise (steps) and rest (sleep). I may have occasional days with insufficient sleep or activity, but using Heads Up Health I can look back over the course of the month and ensure I am making up for lighter days.

 Figure 3: Looking back over the past month to ensure I am on track with sleep

Figure 3: Looking back over the past month to ensure I am on track with sleep

Heads Up Health also let you compare your Shine data with other health metrics, like weight, BMI, body fat percentage, blood pressure, blood sugar and even data coming from your electronic health records.

MisFit Shine Review - Tracking MisFit data alongside other health data

MisFit Shine Review – Tracking MisFit data alongside other health data

A Word of Caution

One caveat with the Shine is that several Heads Up Heath users — myself included — have lost the device because it fell out of the wrist strap. Losing the device is a risk with any tracker but the Shine seems especially prone to slipping out of the wrist band. That said, when I contacted Misfit support to report the issue, they gladly issued me a replacement at no charge. Kudos to Misfit for providing great customer support.

The Verdict Is. . .

Overall the Shine is an awesome device. It’s reasonably priced and comes with some great benefits. Using the Shine with your Heads Up Health account can be an even better combination. Misfit just released a new version of the Shine, which is supposed to have improved accuracy for sleep and activity tracking and we’re excited to test it out.

If you’re ready to link up your Shine with Heads Up Health, head over to our website and get started! Or to if you just want the latest from Heads Up Health, follow us on Facebook or Twitter. Lastly, if you’ve got questions about how to get started tracking your health, shoot us an email. We’re here to help!