11 Best Keto Apps and Diet Trackers in 2024
If the global pandemic situation has affected you in the sense of gaining some weight, you might’ve looked here and there for various ways to shed those extra pounds off, and without a lot of effort, if possible. If you did your research right, you also might’ve discovered that one of the best ways to lose weight is to reduce your calorie intake, or, in human terms, be careful what and how much you eat.
However, many people just don’t have the time to plan meals or constantly worry about the nutritional value of the food they ingest. Thankfully, that’s what diet plans are for; after confirming that a certain diet is good for you, all you have to do is search for a plan that could fit well among your daily activities and follow its instructions closely. If you do it right, you should start seeing results in no time.
The ketogenic diet, conveniently called keto, falls in the category we’ve widely described above.
Note that you should check with your physician whether or not the ketogenic diet is right for you before you start adopting it into your lifestyle. Although this diet doesn’t restrict you as much regarding the quantity of food you can consume, it does eliminate almost entirely some groups of foods from your daily meal plans.
What is the keto diet?
Although simple in its essence, the ketogenic diet is actually quite complex due to the series of processes that it can trigger in the human body, if done exactly right. The goal of this diet is to trick your body into going into a state called ketosis, where it uses stored fat as a source of energy instead of carbohydrates.
By default, your body relies on the food you supplement it with to survive. Imagine food as if it were fuel, and your daily activities as being a distance you want to cover with your car. Your body needs to burn calories in order to work, and the more of a strain you put on it, the more calories it will need. That’s precisely why people with an active lifestyle need to consume more calories than those who have a sedentary lifestyle. Just like a car needs more fuel to cover larger distances, your body needs those calories if you’re going to work it hard.
However, if you’re not careful enough and overload with calories, your body will try to get rid of some of them, but the other part that doesn’t get burned or eliminated is stored as body fat, in case you might need it someday.
Ketosis is a state where your body starts burning away body fat instead of carbohydrates, which is what you can achieve by following a keto diet. The principle behind the keto diet is quite simple: a major source of energy comes from carbohydrates, so the keto diet eliminates almost all carbohydrates from your daily meals, replacing them with fat and protein.
So if you’re going to follow a keto diet, you should expect that a lot of carbs will be cut off and replaced with fats. You could still consume SOME carbs, but the percentage is negligible. An average daily keto meal would look like this: 70-80% fat, 10-20% protein, and only 5-10% carbohydrates. These values should add up to represent your total daily calorie intake.
Although many promote the idea that you can eat as much as you want while you’re on keto, as long as you respect the proportions embraced by the diet, this can actually be a bad idea. Generally speaking, you may find it difficult to overeat when almost everything you eat consists of fat and protein. However, overeating on keto is not unheard of, and you could easily fall through the cracks of consuming way too many calories compared to your regular intake.
Therefore, it goes without saying that you should have good discipline and at least a bit of experience at keeping your meal plan balanced so that you can follow the percentages that the ketogenic diet promotes without difficulty. Although you could go ahead and start a food journal, buy a kitchen scale and start reading all the nutritional label values of all the food you eat, using a specialized app could be far easier for you.
Why do I need a keto app?
As we’ve briefly hinted above, keto apps are a great way to keep track of your daily meals, plan ahead, discover new recipes, track your progress, keep a weight journal, create shopping lists, and even connect with other members of the keto community if the app supports this feature.
If you’ve heard about the keto diet, chances are you already own a smartphone and already know what that tiny device you always carry around in your pocket is really capable of. So it should come as no surprise when we tell you that one of the best way to keep you motivated throughout your keto diet weight loss journey would be using your smartphone to keep tabs on everything, manage your daily meals, and, why not, even keep you motivated.
What are the best keto apps?
If you’re already on board with the ketogenic diet and want to make sure you follow it completely in a comprehensive, yet intuitive manner, then you might be in need of reliable virtual assistance. We believe that dedicated keto apps are the best way to do so since they comprise several specialized features that could simplify your weight loss journey by a great deal.
For that reason, we’ve searched for only the best keto apps on the market and bundled them in an easy-to-follow list. As you’ll soon learn, there are several great apps that could help you keep track of everything while you’re on the keto diet. However, you should know that there are just as many (if not more) that sound really promising and then they under-deliver, making it impossible for you to keep track of your progress, or even worse, make you lose progress by offering you inaccurate measurements, false information, or buggy features.
In our guide, we’ve worked with the experts at GreenAndKeto.com to ensure we include only high-quality apps that will help you achieve your goal. It’s worth mentioning that some apps will require you to purchase a subscription plan, but we assure you that if you’re serious about keto and losing weight, buying a plan would be absolutely worth it.
Without further ado, the best keto apps on the market are as follows:
-
Carb Manager
- Carb Manager is an excellent assistant app for you if you’ve decided to follow the ketogenic diet to lose or maintain weight, or simply improve the general quality of your life. It lets you track various keto metrics, log food through various means (barcode, voice command, database search), sync with other similar apps and fitness trackers, and keep tabs on other healthy habits, such as exercise, and daily water intake.
-
KetoDiet
- KetoDiet could be a great starting point if you’ve just discovered the ketogenic diet and want not only to learn more about it but also give it a try. It features an impressive collection of food items and delicious recipes along with their nutritional values, and other details that will prove valuable for your weight-losing journey, such as macros, serving size, and calorie count.
-
Senza
- Senza is a user-friendly app that will help you get started in your keto journey by providing you with everything you need, ranging from useful metrics to advices and helpful guides. You can use Senza if you want to try keto but you’re not ready to cut carbs cold turkey, as the app can graciously ease you in the diet. Senza can also track other lifestyle factors, such as your sleep steps, fasting, and exercise.
-
Keto
- Keto, also known as Keto.app, enables you to reach your goals by creating a personalized plan you can follow, whether you’re trying to lose, maintain, or gain weight through the keto diet. After creating a virtual profile within the app, you can use the app to calculate your perfect carbs, fats, and protein ratio and see what meals and foods are good for you, and which ones will kick your body out of ketosis.
-
Total Keto Diet
- Total Keto Diet has one of the most comprehensive libraries of keto recipes, so you know you won’t run out of ideas if you’re trying to plan ahead meals for the entire week. The app provides you with ketogenic diet meal plans that are customized according to your goals and preferences and has an interactive grocery list you could use to purchase food items required by the recipes you’re interested in.
-
MyMacros+
- The food database of MyMacros+ comprises no less than 5 million food items, recipes, and meal plans, neatly organized so that you can find them without spending an eternity scrolling through menu pages. It also includes a food logging component that you can use without an active Internet connection, a social feature that lets you connect with friends and family who are using the app, and a macro coach that can guide you on your food choices.
-
FatSecret
- FatSecret is a great app if you’re trying to lose weight, as it packs a plethora of tools that could help you reach your goal in an interactive manner. The app will display your ultimate goal, but you can also set smaller goals, so you can enjoy several victories whenever you reach one of them. FatSecret features a handy food log, an exercise diary to keep tabs of your workouts, a large collection of recipes, as well as food image recognition.
-
PlateJoy
- Although not designed with ketogenic diet users in mind, PlateJoy can be easily used to reach your weight-losing goals if you’re following the keto diet. Before you get started, PlateJoy will ask you to take a quiz regarding your personal traits and dietary preferences, and simply pointing the app towards a low-carb-oriented diet should be enough to get you started on your keto journey with this app.
-
Foodabi
- Foodabi is a simplistic app that you can use to find various low-carb and keto recipes, plan your meals accordingly, and count your calories in a user-friendly manner. You can find a lot of low-carb and keto cooking videos you can follow if you’re not exactly a cooking expert. Furthermore, Foodabi will offer you a personalized meal plan based on your preferences, which also includes a calorie counter, so you know if you’re within your daily limits.
-
8fit
- 8fit is not only an app you can use as a keto enthusiast but also one that could help you integrate fitness among your daily activities through various fun and engaging workouts that don’t necessarily require any piece of equipment. 8fit comes with various customized meal plans, can sync your steps through various services such as Health Kit or Google Fit, has a built-in shopping list feature, and can assess your starting workout level.
-
MyFitnessPal
- MyFitnessPal is another app that’s not specifically designed with ketogenic diet users in mind, but it works great as a virtual assistant if you’ve planned on losing weight by going keto. It has a huge database counting more than 11 million food items at the time being, and you can specifically filter out foods and meals that are not low-carb. Furthermore, its workout component can help you stay in shape while shedding those extra pounds.
The 11 Best Keto Apps (Ranked and Reviewed)
1. Carb Manager
Carb Manager is one of the best apps you could use to track your daily calorie intake and organize your meal plans if you’re really serious about following the keto diet the way it’s been intended. Perhaps the most important aspect of this app is the fact that it offers you an experience that is tailored to your personal traits, such as your daily activity level, current weight, glycemic load, intermittent fasting timeframes, and insulin levels.
The app showcases an advanced macros tracker that can help you easily split your meal plans according to the keto diet, making sure that you hit all your macro levels, whether it’s protein, fat, or carbs we’re talking about. You just have to log the food you eat each day in the app, and Carb Manager will display your macro levels for that day. Furthermore, while using Carb Manager you’ll get user-specific macros that are automatically adjusted as you progress towards your goals.
The food tracker component of the app is quite complex considering that it features built-in scanning capabilities so that you don’t have to type in every little nutritional value parameter of your foods. You just scan the barcode and let Carb Manager extract all the information it needs from the product’s description. You can use the food tracker to either log a food you ate at some point, or just check if the item you’re scanning is keto-friendly. Carb Manager also features voice logging, so you can just activate it with a “hey Carb Manager” and say what you ate out loud. Quite impressive, right?
Carb Manager features a comprehensive recipe database that includes more than 3000 exclusive premium recipes created by chefs, which could save you some serious time you would’ve spent looking for the perfect keto recipes. Recipes have preparation time, a calorie counter, a macros tracker, and a bookmark feature. There are also free recipes that have been submitted by users and vetted by members of the Carb Manager community. You can add all recipes to your daily log at the tap of a button.
Carb Manager’s built-in meal planner can lift the burden of thinking about what you’re going to eat in a few days, or the next time you’ll be hungry. However, it doesn’t simply lock your choices in and forces you to accept whatever it has planned for you. Instead, it presents you with a bunch of alternatives that you can easily choose from and even replace ones that you’re not interested in. Furthermore, the meal planner has an embedded grocery list and is synchronized with the daily log.
If you’re new to keto, Carb Manager’s Keto Academy features a broad range of interactive video lessons that can bring you up to speed. However, you can also learn how to cook keto and learn about advanced supplements, different styles of keto, and combining keto with fasting using this feature. The community component of Carb Manager lets you connect with experts, find motivation in others’ success stories, and post or read content on keto forums.
Carb Manager also features an exercise portal in case you want to take it up a notch. This feature can help you create workout routines, log any activity (even ones that are not available in the app), and track your daily workouts like a pro. Last, but not least, this app can track over 30 body metrics such as blood pressure, insulin, and exercise. Furthermore, this app makes it possible that you can integrate carb cycling or fasting into your keto diet.
You can download Carb Manager on Google Play Store for Android phones and tablets, and from the App Store for iOS devices.
2. KetoDiet
KetoDiet is a comprehensive, user-friendly keto app that can help you achieve your weight-loss goals by following a low-carb diet in an intuitive, user-friendly fashion by providing you with everything you need, ranging from a meal planner, a progress checker, a diet guide, and a shopping list.
The app comprises more than 1600 recipes that have been tried and tested on its integrated blog. You can use the in-app blog to read more about the keto diet, discover more recipes, and learn new interesting facts about various foods. KetoDiet also allows you to create your own meals by adding custom foods and ingredients to the list that you can use later on to design your plan. It’s easy to edit, add, or clone foods to any day of your plan.
The recipes offer you a great level of detail so that you don’t have to look them up someplace else, as well as accurate nutritional values of foods you use to create the recipes. The optional ingredients we’ve mentioned above give you just enough elbow room to create a more flexible course for you, but you should be careful not to overstep any macro if you want keto to work. It’s also quite important that you can bookmark your favorite recipes and adjust the serving size from within the app.
KetoDiet features a comprehensive profile editor that you can use to provide the app with useful information about yourself, so it can adapt to your needs in a more efficient manner. Thus, you can use the profile editor to set your carb goals and limits, determine your ideal macro intake by using the built-in keto calculator, constantly update your body measurements (weight, body fat) to track your progress effectively, as well as sync your progress across multiple devices if you choose to create a KetoDiet account.
If you’re the type of person who likes to plan ahead, even when it comes to meals, KetoDiet has got you covered. You can create and customize your own diet plan by using some of the hundreds of meals included in the application, but you can also create your custom meals if you’re feeling especially creative. Additionally, KetoDiet provides you with several quick 1-ingredient snacks to stop your cravings, restaurant meals, and barcode scanning to identify branded products easier and add them to your daily log.
Wondering about progress tracking? KetoDiet has the full package. In addition to helping you keep tabs on your total weight and body fat, KetoDiet can also assist you in tracking various other body stats, your water, carb, and macros intake, your mood and energy levels, blood glucose, blood lipids, as well as ketones from your urine, blood, and breath.
If you’re a keto novice, some of the terms and knowledge you’ll encounter while using the app may feel a bit overwhelming. Fortunately, KetoDiet features several guides that could teach you all about the ketogenic diet, help you understand what ketosis is and why it’s an important part of this diet, as well as show you what you should eat and avoid while you’re on a keto diet.
KetoDiet is available to download on Android and iOS devices from the Google Play Store and the App Store.
3. Senza
If you’re a beginner, then Senza is definitely where you should start with your keto journey. The app sports a simple, yet beautiful interface that offers you a zero-nonsense, streamlined experience so that you can not only track your progress towards your goals on the keto diet but also understand a bit more about the processes that develop in your body, one day at a time.
Instead of following the standard low-carb approach, Senza lets you take a more effective, albeit more restrictive path that combines the ketogenic diet with fasting. Thus, you will not only be following a low-carb diet, but you’ll also intertwine it with eating only in an specific time window. The application lets you configure your plan by adjusting weight-losing goals and the way you can achieve them.
Therefore, you can use Senza to track the nutritional value of the foods you’re consuming, keep tabs on your eating windows, manage workouts, and track your weight to see if you’re heading in the right direction or still need some adjustments. If you’re the type of person who likes to bask in the glory of losing even a tiny amount of weight each day, then this app is exactly what you’ve been needing but didn’t know you did.
Senza has a tremendous database that holds over 1.6 million food items, as well as over 5000 recipes for various diet types, including paleo, carnivore, and ketogenic. The app can also help you calculate the net carbs value of different foods by subtracting fiber and sugar alcohol from the total amount of carbs that those foods comprise.
The application also has a time-based logging system that’s easy to use, so you’ll know exactly when you ate each meal, so you don’t accidentally overlap your eating window with your non-eating one. Senza features a barcode scanner so that you can add branded foods to your log without having to look them up in a database or input their nutritional values manually, all by yourself. You just point your phone’s camera to the barcode of the food item you’re trying to log and let Senza do all the heavy lifting.
There’s also a built-in fasting timer letting you know exactly how much time you have left until your next eating window opens. If you don’t have enough time to cook a proper keto meal, Senza also has an interactive map of restaurants that serve keto meals, as well as their menus. Not exactly satisfied with Senza’s food database? Not to worry: the app provides you with a series of features that you can use to build your own meals, and you can also include private or custom food items to the app’s database, if needed.
If you like having and being able to access everything from a single location, Senza can provide you with that experience as far as losing weight goes. You can use the app to track your progress with various activities, whether it’s following a certain type of diet (in this case keto), engaging in a fasting schedule, and exercising. However, the app can also track body stats such as ketones, glucose, or your body weight. In addition, you can sync the app with Google Fit, Fitbit, and Biosense, if you need or want to.
Senza can also be a great experience to share with your friends thanks to its numerous social features that let you log from each other’s journals, motivate each other to stay on track, share your goals and breakthroughs with your friends, as well as exchange recipes, and tips and tricks for following a keto, paleo, or carnivore lifestyle.
You can download and use Senza on Android and iOS devices from the Google Play Store, and respectively the App Store.
4. Keto
This app is simply called Keto, but you can find it easier by its full name, Keto.app, if you look it up online. Keto is an extraordinary app that you can use to keep track of your progress throughout the keto diet, whether we’re talking about your food habits, your weight and body fat percentage, your water intake, or your burned calories we’re talking about.
Keto is a Swedish army knife of keto enthusiasts, as it provides you with a broad range of features you could use to simplify your keto-assisted weight-loss journey. You can use it to customize your macro goals by tailoring them to your body type and your level of activity. You can choose from various goals such as weight loss, maintaining your current weight, or gaining mass.
The application enables you to record, view, and analyze your nutrition goals, to ensure that you consume an appropriate amount of protein, fat, calories, and net carbs. Net carbs are determined by subtracting fiber and sugar alcohol from the total amount of carbs that a certain type of food has, but Keto is also able to count the total amount of carbs if you want it to.
To make the app work for you properly, you’ll need to log everything you eat on a daily basis and be completely honest with the app (and yourself). You can track all the meals you had in one day altogether, but if you want you can also split them into breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Additionally, you shouldn’t worry about giving the Keto app-specific details such as how many protein grams per serving did the food you ate had, or the number of carbs per 100g.
Instead, you can either use the simple search engine embedded within the app or scan your food or beverage barcode using the build-in barcode scanner. If you choose to go with the Keto search engine, you’ll probably notice that certain foods and beverages are marked so that you can decide faster between what food or drink you should have to make sure you achieve your daily goal. The Keto app has an impressive database of products from the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, Russia, and South Africa.
The foods you’ve consumed can be sorted by any macronutrient supported by the ap, and doing so couldn’t be easier. All macronutrients are displayed at the top of the screen, and each of them resides inside a circle. The circles also serve as indicators, as they’re filled with color based on the percentage of the macronutrient they represent within a given food item. Simply tapping the circles can sort food items by macros, so you can have a clear overview of what you’re interested in.
The app can keep track of how many steps you took, as well as how many calories you burned in a given period of time, and it can also be synced with your FitBit, import your activities from FitBit, and synchronize with Apple Health. You can, for instance, export your personal nutrition data, activities, weight, and water intake to use with Apple Health.
Furthermore, you can log changes in your weight to make sure that you didn’t stray from your weight-loss path. Keto also includes a water intake tracker where you can set a daily goal for water consumption and track it effectively, as drinking water is important not only for the weight-loss process but also to remain hydrated during the day. It’s a known fact that the keto diet flushes out water from your body by reducing inflammation, so keeping yourself hydrated during this diet is paramount.
You can download the Keto app for iOS and Android devices from the Apple Store and Google Play Store.
5. Total Keto Diet
Struggling to keep tabs on everything while you’re following a ketogenic diet? Not to worry, that’s precisely why specialized apps have been invented: to assist you with various activities in your day-to-day life. Total Keto Diet is an awesome mobile app that can help you create custom meal plans for your keto diet, but also provides you with a plethora of low-carb recipes, a huge food database, and shopping list capabilities.
Much like other similar apps, it includes a macro tracker that you can use to overview your macronutrient and calorie intake every day, so that you make sure that you don’t cut any corners and receive the right amount of fat, protein, and carbs. Total Keto Diet comes with custom meal plans that are tailored to your goals, body, and level of activity, so there are no two identical plans.
Within the app you’ll be able to find more than 800 keto recipes that were created by the Total Keto Diet team, and also tested and enriched with photographs, so you don’t have to look them up on different platforms because of unclear instructions. Each recipe features ingredient preparation and cooking times, as well as the number of carbohydrates per serving, so you could know at a glance whether or not certain recipes are good for you.
Additionally, you can find a shopping list feature that lets you add ingredients from the app’s built-in keto recipes or create your own custom ingredients that you can include in your meal plans. Although you can use the app for all your ketogenic diet management needs, you can also export certain information such as meal plans to PDFs so you can share it or print them out so you can access them without depending on your phone.
Total Keto Diet also features a calculator that can help you determine whether you’ve reached your macro goal, are still a long way from it or you’ve gone overboard. The app can automatically calculate the net carb amount by subtracting fiber and sugar alcohols from the total amount of carbs that a certain food item contains, but you can also set it to display the total amount of carbs if you’re more comfortable with that.
The application enables you to export your data so you can view and analyze it with third-party software solutions, and gives you weekly digests based on your overall activity. There’s also the possibility that you can sync Total Keto Diet with FitBit in order to import physical activities within the app and track them from there, such as walking, running, or cycling.
Total Keto Diet also supports weight check-in photos, so that you can compare your body in terms of weight by logging your weight occasionally, but also looks. Note that you may not see much difference on a scale if you’re heavily exercising, but you’ll definitely see improvement in your before and after photos.
Last, but not least, it’s worth mentioning that Total Keto Diet includes a guide for beginners that aims to answer even the most burning questions of keto novices. For instance, you can learn more about what the keto diet is, how to test for ketosis, discover scientific facts about fat, learn more about macronutrients, and even understand what the keto flu is and how it can affect you.
Total Keto Diet is available to download for iOS and Android devices on Google’s Play Store and the App Store.
6. MyMacros+
If you’re an advanced keto diet adept, you may benefit more from an app that doesn’t spoon-feed you as much, such as MyMacros+. This app features a no-nonsense approach that can help you reach your goals, but that doesn’t imply that it’s not also user-friendly for those who are just starting their weight-loss journey assisted by the ketogenic diet.
MyMacros+’s huge database comprises more than 5 million food items that you can choose from, giving you plenty of options if you’re trying to customize your own keto meal plans. However, if you’re a true novice and don’t know where to start, MyMacros+ has got you covered, as it can provide you with quite a rich selection of meal plans that you can customize according to your needs, goals, and personal traits.
You can create custom food items if you don’t find exactly what you’re looking for within the app. MyMacros+ has an intuitive system that you can use to create your own food items that you can add to your meal plans without breaking a sweat. All you have to do is use the Add Custom Food feature in the Food Menu and follow the on-screen instructions. The process is quite streamlined and you shouldn’t require additional assistance to go through with adding custom foods.
This app can run natively on a broad range of devices, including but not limited to your PC, whether it’s a laptop or a desktop PC, Mac, iPhones, iPads, Android phones, and tablets, as well as Apple Watches. Therefore, it may be quite suitable for you if you’re looking for an app that allows you to keep track of your progress on numerous platforms synchronously.
The application gives you elaborate details and insight on how the diet you’re trying to follow (in this case keto, but you can choose some other ones, as well) affects your goals and metabolism. If you’re not exactly in the know regarding the way the keto diet works and need to brush up your knowledge about the processes that unfold in your body while you’re digesting, MyMacros+ has you covered.
You can use the multi-platform feature of MyMacros+ to manage your diet on various devices, keep track of your body stats, see the exact macro values for everything you plan on eating (or have already eaten), plan your meals ahead of having them, discover new recipes, scan product barcodes for easy food logging, and even track your fasting intervals from the device of your choice. You can even start working on your laptop, for instance, and switch to a mobile version of the app if you suddenly have to leave.
If it’s hard for you to keep motivated, you’ll probably be glad to learn that MyMacros+ has a social component that you can use to share your progress with others, or, if you’re not exactly a social butterfly, you can check on others’ progress and use it to stay motivated and remain focused on your goals. However, this feature is only available on the iOS version of the app, which is quite unfair, but we’re sure it’ll be added to other versions of the app sometime soon.
As opposed to other similar products, MyMacros+ features a light, lifetime version, which only costs $2.99, and also has a pro version that is based on a monthly or yearly subscription model. The light version features everything we’ve discussed above, so if you’re simply looking for an app that can help you keep track of your progress in your keto-assisted weight-loss journey, MyMacros+ is perfectly fine.
However, if you want more from the app, you may want to consider giving a try to the pro, subscription-based version. It offers you full website access to MyMacros+, lets you add unlimited meals, has infinite nutritional goal profiles, provides you with a weekly diet summary, has priority customer support, offers you a macro breakdown by meal, food, and day, and unblocks all features in the mobile apps.
7. FatSecret
If you’ve never heard about FatSecret, chances are you won’t even guess what it is without giving a glance at its list of features. While its name is a bit misleading, FatSecret is an awesome app that you can use to watch your weight (and even drop some pounds) by counting the calories in your daily eating routine.
As we’ve mentioned before, one of the most common misconceptions about keto is that you don’t need to worry about the number of calories you consume, as long as you follow the macro percentages and make sure that your diet is mostly based on fat and protein. Many studies have shown that you can still overeat even if you’re following the ketogenic diet, so a calorie counter might not be the craziest thing.
FatSecret is a sure way to get rid of unwanted pounds and keep them at bay by making you use one of nature’s best pound-shredding devices: counting calories and making sure you don’t go over your recommended daily intake. As we’re sure you understand, different levels of activity require different calorie intake values. For instance, you can’t, or better yet shouldn’t consume the same amount of calories as a lumberjack if you work inside an office all day long and do pretty much nothing else in terms of physical activity.
The app is 100% free, so you can use it at your leisure without ever worrying that you’ll have to reach for your wallet in order to use it. FatSecret also sports a website where you can check food items and recipes, just to make sure that they match or diet, or better yet, use these features if you ever run out of ideas regarding what you can cook or what else you can eat instead of your boring, regular meals. The website is also completely free and completes the app’s features quite nicely.
Now about the app, you’ll be thrilled to learn that FatSecret comes with various features that can help you boost your weight-losing goals in various manners. For instance, it has a food diary that can help you keep track of what you’ve been eating by simply putting each meal and food item within the app. FatSecret will automatically add them all up and tell you whether or not you’re on the right track.
FatSecret also showcases a huge selection of healthy recipes that you can sort by a large number of criteria, such as meal type (appetizers, dessert, breakfast, lunch, dinner, salad, soup, snack), ingredients (dairy, seafood, vegetables, meat, herbs, spices, grain, fruit), and diet type (diabetic, gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, low fat, low cholesterol, and low carb, which is essentially keto).
Each recipe overview lets you know the per-serve nutritional values of the meal you can prepare by using it, including energy (kcal), carb, protein, and fat, but you can also see a user rating. Most (if not all) recipes are submitted by users, and, as you can expect, some are more invested than others, so the user rating system can come in really handy if you want to avoid poorly written instructions, lack of pictures, or mismatched ingredients.
FatSecret provides you with lists of all nutritional values for various foods, restaurant items, meals, and brands. The app has a barcode scanner, so you won’t have to worry about spending a lot of time manually putting all the relevant info within your food diary. You just launch the app, navigate to the appropriate section, and point your phone to the barcode of the brand food item you’re trying to log into your diary. FatSecret will automatically detect it and add it to your food diary.
If you are or want to be more active, you could combine your diet-based weight-losing journey with exercising. Fortunately, FatSecret also packs an awesome workout diary where you could log various types of exercises and how long you’ve performed them, so you can also keep track of the number of calories you burn, and not only the ones you consume.
Additionally, FatSecret grants you access to a weight journal and chart, so you can record any weight changes that go on with your body and keep tabs on your evolution through your weight-losing process in a user-friendly, intuitive manner. The app also lets you interact with the chart, so you could check previous trends and try to avoid mistakes you might’ve made which caused your weight to spike for a short while.
FatSecret comes with mobile apps for iPad, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows, but you can also use it on your Windows PC by downloading it from the Microsoft Store. Although the app is completely free to use, you may encounter some in-app purchases while using it.
8. PlateJoy
PlateJoy is a dieting app that promotes a simple, yet powerful message: “healthy eating for busy people.” Growing up, we used to hear that time is our biggest enemy and the boldest of us even ridiculized those who were chanting this idea. However, if you’ve worked around the clock, you probably understand that, at least to some degree, time is really one of the finest things in life, a luxury that most of us can’t seem to afford lately.
That’s precisely what PlateJoy seems to exploit by offering those of us who lack time a healthy alternative to eating. We all know how preparing a healthy meal can take a lot of time and slipping those extra tens of minutes before your sleeping time or in your lunch break seems to be impossible, so the app attracted quite a few users over time, and for good reason, too.
If any of the thoughts expressed above have hit home, you may want to consider giving PlateJoy a try. Here’s what makes this app stand out in the crowd: it uses a complex algorithm based on more than fifty data points to generate a completely personalized weekly menu for you, one that fits your preferences but still helps you reach your goals, whether they’re losing, gaining, or maintaining weight.
Furthermore, PlateJoy comes with smart grocery lists that, unlike other apps, takes into account food items that you already own, thus helping you save money and reduce waste by a tremendous deal. The app also designs its shopping lists in such a manner that it could actually help you reduce the time you spend at the store.
Even if you don’t have time to go grocery shopping, PlateJoy comes with an awesome feature that allows you to order your favorite food from Amazon Fresh and Instacart at a press of a button. You just need to make sure that you have everything on your shopping list, then use the optional order feature to save time by having the items delivered to your doorstep.
We’ve included PlateJoy on our list because obviously, it’s a great assistant to have if you’ve decided to shed some pounds by following the ketogenic diet. However, PlateJoy is capable of so much more than guiding you through keto, and unlike other services, it doesn’t spread itself too thin, so you’ll still get all the help you need, even if you decide to stick to your keto diet religiously and give no other diet or meal plan a try.
We’re still going to tell you what you may be missing, in terms of “secondary” diet plans: clean eating, low carb, Mediterranean, dairy-free, paleo, kid-friendly, vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, low FODMAP, and gluten-free.
In order to get started, PlateJoy will attempt to assess some facts about you, your dietary preferences and habits, as well as your lifestyle and any particularities related to you. It’s worth mentioning that if you want to see noticeable results, you need to be completely honest during your assessment and not indulge yourself in many cheat answers.
Among the questions PlateJoy will ask you, it’s possible to find whether or not you’re limiting carbs, how often do you eat meat, and what type of meat do you normally consume, your age and weight-losing goals, your activity levels, if you’re trying to avoid any specific ingredients, as well as how many recipes you’d like to see each week for every meal type (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack and dessert), and for how many people you’ll be cooking.
After answering all the questions (hopefully) truthfully, PlateJoy will generate a customized meal plan for you that will, without a doubt, help you reach your goals or at least move a great amount towards them. It’s worth noting that you can modify certain aspects of your meal plan at any given time. For instance, if you suddenly decide not to consume meat anymore, or have developed an allergy to a certain ingredient, you can easily change these parameters.
You can use PlateJoy on any desktop computer or laptop (PC, Mac) that has a web browser, but you can also download the app on your iPhone or Android phones and tablets. Note that PlateJoy is not free, but it does offer you a generous trial that you can cancel at any point.
9. Foodabi
If you’re trying to go keto, you may already know what you can expect; you’ll be eating way fewer carbohydrates, while supplementing your body with a lot of fat and protein, tricking it into entering ketosis, a state where it burns energy from your fat deposits, instead of relying on carbs. If you already knew all of that and you’re serious about it, then you’re absolutely good to go.
More than that, it also means that learning about the existence of the Foodabi app, which promotes keto and low carb diets, will make perfect sense to you, especially if you’ve been looking for a way to keep track of everything you eat, discover new relevant recipes, and have a trustworthy assistant that could suggest you a meal plan, as well as inform you about every macronutrient you’re about to ingest.
Granted, the app is not nearly as complex as some other entries on our list, but you can still use Foodabi if you plan on sticking to the ketogenic diet or simply want to reduce the number of carbs you’re eating on a daily basis. Foodabi comes with cooking videos for various low-carb recipes so that you can follow them without worrying that you may mess something up.
More so, after learning a few things about you, Foodabi can generate an individualized meal plan that you can follow. The meal planner feature comes with a calorie counter component so that you can always be in the know regarding the number of calories you consume per meal, per day, or per given period of time. You can also modify your individualized meal plan in real-time by adjusting your daily calorie consumption. This will trigger the app to recommend other types of food or keep the variety while dropping the number of certain food items.
After creating your food plan, Foodabi lets you create shopping lists based on meals and periods of time. For instance, you can take all the meals that the app has planned for you this week and see all the ingredients you will need to buy if you plan on preparing all of them. Alternatively, you can tap a specific meal, and Foodabi will only display the ingredients you’ll need to prepare it. It’s also possible to use an ingredients list without recipes, just in case you plan on purchasing a larger quantity and feel that seeing all the recipes listed could confuse you.
The diet plans that Foodabi offers you are tailored based on your body stats (age, gender, weight, height), but also on your personal preferences so that you could tone it down a notch if you feel that it’s too drastic. The principle is quite simple: based on the body stats that you provide the app with, Foodabi calculates your BMI, macros, and calories, and presents you with a meal plan based on all of these parameters.
If at some point you feel that your meal plan isn’t exactly the way you wanted it to be, you can easily replace any and every recipe with a different low-carb recipe from the same database and Foodabi will let you know if you’re still within your calorie and macro limits after performing the modifications. Foodabi also sports a weight loss guide that will explain to you several things that are important while following a low-carb diet, so you don’t have to follow meal plans blindly without knowing what’s going on in your body.
While it’s obvious that Foodabi was designed for iOS users (the Android app page has a lot of Apple and iTunes references, as well as Apple Health integration mentions), you can also use it on Android devices. Note that the developers mention that you could use the app for free, but the lack of features and recipes makes it not worth the trouble. Therefore, if you’re looking for a free app that’s actually usable, you may try another one on our list.
10. 8fit
If you’re trying to bring a little order to your life and embrace more good habits such as eating healthy, meditate, sleep better, and workout, then 8fit may be exactly what you need right now. Although not a dedicated keto app, 8fit has a well-deserved spot in our top, granted that you can use it as an awesome assistant on your ketogenic weight-loss journey just as well as you would if you’re simply trying to work out in a more organized fashion.
8fit is what we’d never hesitate to call a Swedish army knife, or a multitool of any good habit practitioner, whether you’re trying to shed a few pounds, eat healthy for all the benefits associated with it, meditate, tone your body and prepare it for beach season, or simply sleep better. It has everything you need to get started and keep going on your self-improvement journey.
8fit combines a broad range of fun and varied workouts so that you won’t get tired of running the same routine over and over again, and your body won’t have a chance to adapt and reach a plateau from your physical activities anytime soon. The app comprises HIIT full-body training, yoga, Pilates, stretching, and even cardio boxing for the more daring of you.
You can engage in weekly challenges and keep track of your progress, either individually or en-masse. For instance, you can set a number of goals that you want to reach one week, such as walking a number of steps, stretch for a specific amount of minutes, or do aerobics a number of times, and check the app each time you go through a checkpoint. As it turns out, splitting your workouts in several checkpoints and meeting each of them can keep you motivated for longer, and you’re less prone to giving up when you have smaller goals that lead you to a big one.
But if you’ve reached this article, chances are you’re not here for the workout stuff that 8fit has to offer, although working out is quite important if you’re trying to lose weight in a healthy fashion. If you’re here to talk about the ketogenic diet, then that’s precisely what we’ll focus on. 8fit can and will create a personalized meal plan based on your dietary preferences, and will allow you to exclude any food item from your plans, regardless of whether it’s a personal preference or an allergy.
The meal plans that 8fit can create for you can be based on various dietary preferences, such as dairy-free, vegetarian, gluten-free, and yes, even keto, or low carb. Each meal plan you’ll configure with this app lets you access a generous amount of recipes that are neatly organized in various categories, as well as a shopping list. Furthermore, you can skip one meal entirely from being logged, change it to another meal, or mark it as done and get it logged in your food diary.
8fit will keep track of everything you eat, and grant you access to an overview, so you can keep tabs on your weight-losing journey like a pro, understand what you’ve been doing right and wrong, and, if needed, do appropriate changes to your lifestyle to reach your goals faster. Everything you eat will be measured in terms of macronutrients and calories. This means that if you’re honest with the app and tell it exactly what and how much you’ve been eating, you’ll have a detailed analysis of how many calories, carbs, protein, and fat, you’ve been ingesting.
Perhaps the most important aspect of 8fit is that it’s free for everyone, so you can go ahead and give it a try, and see if it’s just what you’re looking for. However, you should note that despite the fact that 8fit actually comes in two flavors: a basic, limited version, and a premium one that you’re gonna have to pay for.
As you’d expect, the basic version of 8fit is quite limited and doesn’t provide you with access to all that the app is capable of, such as complete meal plans and exclusive workouts. However, the free and limited version should be enough for you to decide whether or not investing in a Pro subscription plan is worth it.
At the time being, you can use 8fit on any computer that has an Internet connection and a supported web browser, or download it and use it as an app on Android and iOS phones and tablets. Note that some features (such as the pedometer) will only be available if you use the mobile 8fit apps, but you can access data collected through these exclusive features on the web version, as well.
11. MyFitnessPal
If you ever felt tempted to begin a weight-losing journey, you might’ve heard about specialized third-party apps that could help you reach your goals faster, or at least keep track of what matters when you’re trying to shed those extra pounds or generally improve your lifestyle. As you might’ve known before we mentioned it here, one of the most famous apps that fall in this category is MyFitnessPal.
You might wonder why we’ve included it on our extensive list of apps that are good for those who practice the ketogenic diet, since MyFitnessPal works on a higher level, and is not exactly specific in terms of dieting. Despite the fact that it’s not an app that’s specialized in ketogenic diets, unlike other apps on our list, MyFitnessPal makes an awesome candidate even if you plan on using it as a keto diet crutch of sorts.
What this app is excellent at is letting you take control of your goals in a streamlined, intuitive fashion. Whether it’s getting buffed, toning your body for the upcoming beach season, shedding some pounds to fit in your favorite pair of jeans or maintaining your weight, MyFitnessPal has got you covered. However, if you expect your journey to be all keto from the start to its very end, you may want to try other apps that are entirely specialized in the ketogenic diet.
MyFitnessPal combines healthy eating, calorie counting, and workouts to help you achieve your goals without significant efforts. Well, the no effort part goes as far as planning ahead is concerned, because using MyFitnessPal actually involves a certain level of effort that may have you come out of your comfort zone every now and then. However, if you’re serious about it, you’ll notice that MyFitnessPal splits everything into smaller checkpoints so that you can reach your ultimate goals without even noticing.
This app features a nifty food diary that can help you keep tabs on everything that you eat on a daily basis or otherwise. Long story short, whatever you eat, whether it’s a daily habit or a one-time happening, should go in the food diary so that by the end of the day you’ll have a pretty clear picture of the number of calories and macronutrients that you ingest. The app is very accurate in this regard, so you’ll know exactly how many calories you consumed from each meal, but also the amount of protein, fat, and carbohydrates.
Logging each food may feel like a struggle even before you do it, but MyFitnessPal provides you with a plethora of options to log your activities, food items, and meals without spending too much time inside the app. For instance, you can scan the barcodes of brand products, and MyFitnessPal will automatically recognize the products and add them to your log.
Furthermore, you can save meals and recipes for later use, so that you don’t have to spend a lot of time searching for them, and focus on your weight-losing goals instead. MyFitnessPal comes with an outstanding collection that counts way over 11 million food items, all of which contain details such as serving size, nutritional values, and calorie count.
Another thing that makes MyFitnessPal stand out in the crowd is the fact that thanks to its popularity, it has great integration features with a lot of third-party apps. For instance, you can link MyFitnessPal with your Garmin app (and tracker or watch), Samsung Health, FitBit, Apple Health, and MapMyRun. There is huge potential considering that each app will contribute to creating an accurate virtual profile for you so that MyFitnessPal can help you customize your weight-losing plan to perfection.
The best part is that you don’t even need to do this alone: MyFitnessPal has an active community and can provide you with guidance and various advices, so you don’t feel like you’re all alone on your journey, regardless of what your goals are.
It’s worth mentioning that MyFitnessPal is essentially a free app, but it also offers a premium version of its services, so you can expect the free version to be quite limited in terms of features and functionality. The best part is that you can use the free version for as long as you like, as there’s absolutely no time limit.
Additionally, you can use a free 30-day premium trial that will allow you to test all of MyFitnessPal’s premium features, which can help you decide whether or not it would be a wise thing to invest in a monthly premium subscription plan.
You can easily use MyFitnessPal on any PC, Mac, or laptop with a working Internet connection and a supported web browser, or you can download and use it on your Android or iOS phones and tablets.
Best Keto Apps – CONCLUSION
To wrap things up, if you’ve just decided to shed some pounds or simply improve the quality of your life and discovered the ketogenic diet, you probably figured out already that keeping track of your macronutrients can be really difficult without proper assistance from specialized apps.
Sure, you may start a traditional pen-and-paper food journal, but mixing up the numbers is not unheard of, and it can be a real pain to keep reaching for the foods nutritional value label just to figure out how much protein you’ve already eaten, and how much more you can eat without going past your goals.
However, it’s been proven that using a dedicated keto app would not only help you manage your meal plans in a more streamlined and organized fashion, but could even help you reach your goals faster thanks to their user-focused extra features, advices, guides, and active communities (for the added support and motivation).
Using the apps included on our list could help you boost your morale, keep tabs on your daily calorie and macronutrients intake, but also log your workouts, keep track of how much water you’ve drunk, check the quality of your sleep, and help you understand better the changes that your body is going through while following the ketogenic diet.
