Stop. Put down the coffee cake. Now look at your calorie tracker, enter it in, and proceed to enjoy the crumbly goodness. Is this the new, modern “diet”? Many nutrition experts recommend keeping track of what you eat over restrictive diets, because they make you conscious of your choices without depriving you of the foods you love. That coffee cake can be enjoyed without guilt because you have factored it into a daily calorie goal, which means a lighter dinner can even the score enough to maintain that downward line in your weight loss progress.

Of course, it’s best to chat with your doctor before radically changing your diet or fitness routine, so make sure he or she is in the know about your plans. If you’re ready to jump on the healthy eating bandwagon, take out your phone and check out these highly-rated apps:

Daily Burn Tracker
This app is so feature-rich, you would expect to have paid a little more than–well, nothing–for it. Track your daily nutrition to meet calorie goals intelligently set by the program. As you update your food intake throughout the day, Daily Burn keeps track of many more calories you are allowed that day. You can even store foods you eat often as favorites so they’re easier to add.

One feature the app has over its competition is the workout tracker, which allows you to set up training plans, such as weight loss, strength training, and cardio training. The plans set up workouts that you can log after they are completed, adding to your progress bar and your daily calorie limit. Brownie points go to this app for making fitness just a little less complicated!

Fooducate
Warning: downloading this app may result in hours spent scanning every item in your pantry (at least, that’s what happened to me). Fooducate goes above and beyond calories to let you know how a given food item rates (from A to F). If an item turns up with a poor grade, the app recommends similar products that may be better for you.

The most valuable part of the app is its disclosure of the real contents of that package. For example, if you’re wondering whether that “low fat snack bar” is really good for you, just scan the barcode to look it up on Fooducate, and you’ll discover what really went into that chewy goodness. Find out what all of those unpronounceable additives really are, if they’re bad for you, and whether there’s any controversy surrounding them, so you can make an informed choice about whether that item is fit to eat.

Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker by MyFitnessPal
This very highly rated app makes takes food journals out of the dark and into a supportive online community. Based on the premise that “the best way to lose weight is to simply keep track of the foods you eat,” this app intelligently allows you make weight goals and track your progress as you enter in the foods you eat each day.

When logging in for the first time, MyFitnessPal will ask questions about you (gender, height, weight), your habits, and your weekly weight loss goal. Based on that information, the app calculates how many calories you should take in each day, and lets you know how much weight you will lose in a given time. All that is left for you to do is add the food items you eat each day by scanning or searching their extensive database, log your weight, and watch your progress as the pounds drop off.

Restaurant Nutrition
When eating at home, it’s easy to control what goes into your meals. At restaurants? Not so much. At least you can be knowledgeable about what items are better for you with the Restaurant Nutrition app. Their database includes the nutrition facts for over 250 popular restaurants, liberating you to eat out without fear of sabotaging your nutrition goals.

Get the skinny (pardon the pun) on the food items you love, and adjust your meal to fit your diet. Want to splurge on that burger? Better skip the fries and get veggies instead. You can even search based on your customized Diet Plan Settings, so you don’t have to get tempted by a delicious item only to discover it contains a week’s worth of calories.

Calorie Counter by MyNetDiary
This app gets big points for its ease of use (at the time of this writing, many users seemed to agree with nearly 5 out of 5 stars out of 1,000+ reviews). The app tracks food, water, exercise, and even vitamins and meds, helping users meet their goals by following custom plans. Their database is updated daily, and it includes hundreds of thousands of food options that can be searched or scanned.

One of the best parts of MyNetDiary is the daily analysis feature, which provides an overall view of your day’s eating highlights and, yes, the low points too. This friendly tool lets you know, in plain language, what you’re doing right and what you could do better in the future. Ease of use is important for maintaining a steady food journal, so try this app out if you have found other programs to be too time consuming.

Carrie Thompson is a marketing strategist for No More Phone Tag, an Ohio-based flat rate answering services company offering medical answering services, virtual PBX and call management.

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