When it comes to weight loss, understanding how to track calories is crucial. But getting started can feel overwhelming. If you’ve been researching weight loss apps, you might have come across Noom. Noom claims to help users lose weight by tracking caloric intake and helping them understand their food choices. But there’s a catch. Noom isn’t for everyone. Many users find the app’s interface confusing, and some don’t like the way it emphasizes psychological aspects of food and eating. You’re in the right place if you’re looking for a Noom alternative. So, how are calories measured with the best app?
In this article, we’ll explore options for Noom to help you find the best fit for your lifestyle and preferences.
It’s no secret that Noom is not cheap. One of the biggest complaints about Noom is that you can’t get a free trial – sure, you can get 14 days for $1, but then they have your payment information, and $1 is NOT free.
Then, after 14 days, a hefty subscription fee kicks in. Many other nutrition apps have free trials or tiers that can be used indefinitely and provide most of the same benefits as Noom.
Many dieters also find Noom’s food database frustrating. While it tracks both calories and “color” (which is how Noom categorizes food based on nutritional value), many users complain that the food database is terrible, with incorrect calorie counts for many food items. The Android app is also not very intuitive, missing simple features like a recipe builder.
Another common complaint revolves around the coaching, with many users feeling like the coaching isn’t personalized enough. Many users say personal interaction with the coach decreases significantly after the trial period ends and you start paying.
Many dieters also find the app’s humorous motivational style cheesy and annoying after a while. Although it may initially sound cute, it gets repetitive and old quickly.
If you’re starting to think that Noom is a glorified and overpriced calorie tracker, you’re not alone. Fortunately, as mentioned above, many apps like Noom can help you lose weight, maintain a healthy diet, and keep in shape.
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MacroFactor describes itself as “offering an empowering, sustainable approach to nutrition tracking without stress, shaming, or rigidity.” This nutrition app functions like a nutrition coach by providing updated calorie and macronutrient targets based on goals and results.
While MacroFactor doesn’t have educational modules on behavioral psychology like Noom does, in my mind, it more than makes up for this by automatically suggesting new macronutrient targets based on your rate of progress (or lack thereof).
It takes an in-depth understanding of human metabolism to suggest smart, sustainable macronutrient targets, usually, you’d need to work with a nutrition coach for this, making this feature highly valuable. I didn’t like that Noom didn’t clearly show calorie and macronutrient information for foods logged.
The app provides updated custom calorie and macro targets based on your rate of progress compared to your intake instead of using basic formulas that fail to consider whether you are making the progress you want. This creates a more realistic target for achieving your goals more quickly and sustainably.
The food database contains only verified entries, so you can be sure that your intake is accurate; inaccurate intake is one of the top culprits when users fail to achieve their goals. The app has four different options for logging food, making this part of the process as quick and easy as possible:
The more quickly you can log your food, the more likely you are to do it, and the more you log your food, the easier it will be to achieve your goals.
Lifesum is a calorie and macro-tracking app with an extensive food database, a fantastic database of delicious recipes, and the ability to select a custom meal plan. It is specifically designed for people who want to lose weight.
The recipe database is a great way to help people new to healthy eating learn healthy meal ideas. The variety and inspiration are great for long-term users, too. This avoids feelings of boredom and restriction that can cause people to fall off other diet plans.
The app allows users to set their own custom calorie and macronutrient targets, which is great for experienced users and/or people working with a coach who just need an app to track their intake against the coach’s recommendations.
The food rating system goes beyond simply providing a stop-light color code (e.g., green = good) and explains why certain foods are good to include more often and others should be included less often. This gives users the knowledge to help them make good food choices independently without relying on an app in the long term.
MyNetDiary is a very user-friendly calorie-tracking app. It provides meal plans and macronutrient recommendations for various approaches (e.g., keto, paleo, etc.), and the premium version includes personalized nutrition advice from a virtual coach.
Instead of a color-coding system for food like Noom, MyNetDiary gives a food grade based on ratings from nutrition experts. This helps users focus on nutrient-dense choices to optimize their health, not just low calories for weight loss.
The “meal reminders” feature allows users to receive notifications when they need to eat their meals/snacks. This can be helpful for people who need to establish a consistent eating routine to avoid getting too hungry and overeating or failing to eat often enough to achieve a calorie surplus if their goal is weight gain.
The food grading system in MyNetDiary is similar to Noom’s color-coding system. Still, it goes a step above because the grade is based on food ratings from nutrition experts (which considers micronutrients as well) and not just calorie density, which is a key factor in Noom’s system.
This is a great way to get users to focus on including higher-quality foods to optimize their health and not just on calories. The recipes in the database have the macros already calculated. They can be input directly into the diary, saving time logging and giving users delicious, healthy recipes to follow with everyday ingredients. Not needing to figure out what and how much to eat to hit macro targets reduces the stress and work for a new user.
Lose It! is a calorie-counting app focused on helping users lose weight. The app’s premium version allows for:
For users who want to track their cholesterol and/or sodium intake, it’s well worth paying for the premium version to monitor these micronutrients. Noom doesn’t track micronutrients, so there is no way to know if you’re over or under your targets for vitamins and minerals.
The extensive intake form goes beyond standard height, weight, and activity questions. It gets users to reflect on their goals and what they’ve learned from past successes and obstacles, setting them up for a higher chance of success with their current goals.
To maximize their wellness, the app can export daily and weekly nutrition summaries and food logs, which users can then analyze and/or send to a:
The social network directly in the app allows users to communicate with each other for:
My Diet Coach is a calorie and macro tracking app with no extra bells and whistles (no extra features). It is best suited for individuals who already know what an appropriate calorie and macronutrient intake should be for their goals and what combinations of foods they will need to eat to hit those targets healthily.
MyNetDiary is an excellent short-term option for users who want a quick “reset” to track their macros for a week or two. Beyond a few weeks, the $4.75 US/week (after a one-week free trial) would cost more than Noom’s annual membership if used for a year.
Like MyNetDiary, My Diet Coach also has an option to notify me of meal reminders. This can help users get in the groove of eating healthful meals and snacks consistently, making it easier to adhere to their targets and achieve their goals.
The food logging and food database are easy to use, and everyday food items are easy to find (specialty items or brands might not be in the general database, but these can be added as custom food items).
Foodcuate is a calorie tracker with a food database that records calories eaten and helps you hit your targets to achieve your goals (weight loss, weight maintenance, or weight gain). This app is fundamental and straightforward, making it a good choice for users who would be overwhelmed with too many features and data or just want basic info to count calories and nothing more.
I have a few clients who are annoyed and put off by the lessons and food color system in Noom, so Fooducate is a better choice. Plus, they can easily export their food diary to me or another health care professional.
The daily food grade helps educate users about higher-quality foods (similar to MyNetDiary) so that they are not sacrificing their health by focusing only on calories and potentially eating only small amounts of poor-quality foods (which can lead to micronutrient deficiencies).
The food diary can be exported (one-day or seven-day logs) to a:
This is an excellent option for users who need professional oversight of their diet, mainly to help manage health conditions like high blood pressure or cholesterol.
BetterMe is a mobile app for nutrition and health coaching and personal training all in one. It strives to help you develop a healthy and positive relationship with food and fitness. The app provides workouts, meal plans, and daily learning modules to improve your mindset and relationship with food and dieting.
The exercise videos and demonstrations put this app a notch above Noom if you want a one-stop shop for nutrition and fitness.
The daily chapters with lessons on positive self-talk and mindset are valuable for making positive changes with fitness and nutrition, improving the likelihood of achieving your goals. The workouts cater to various needs and include easy-to-follow videos, making it easier to stick to completing them than doing them on your own, which leads to better results.
The additional health challenges in the app allow you to personalize your experience and work on areas that are most important to you, such as sleep or meditation. This gives you custom support and helps you where you need it most.
MyFitnessPal is one of the most popular health and weight management apps, so we'd be remiss not to mention it. While a premium subscription is available, it’s completely optional, and the free version has many excellent features.
In addition to tracking your daily calories and nutrients, you can also find:
There are also a few free plans you can enable to help you get off to a good start, like the Simple Start Challenge or the Building Healthy Habits plan. Another unique feature of MyFitnessPal is its end-of-the-day summary. After you complete your daily food log, it reports that you will be X weight by X time based on your day’s food intake.
This can be helpful information in gauging the feasibility of your goals. As a safety measure, the app will only let you lose a maximum of two pounds per week and will give warning messages if you are losing weight too fast or not consuming enough calories.
Noom and MyFitnessPal provide tools for tracking food consumption and exercise, which are essential for sustainable weight loss.
MyFitnessPal focuses primarily on calorie counting and tracking macros, while Noom emphasizes behavior and psychology changes for long-term success.
MyFitnessPal is a weight loss program suitable for users who are knowledgeable about macro tracking and self-motivated. The app offers a free food tracker and a premium version for enhanced nutrition tracking.
Healthi, formerly iTrackBites, is the perfect Noom-like app for tracking food intake without getting too caught up in exact calorie amounts. It will help you improve your diet and not just cut daily calories.
Every food gets a unique score on Healthi – some foods are counted as zero “bites,” while others are counted as two or three. Your plan will include a daily and weekly allowance for these bites. If you exercise, you can earn additional bites. By consuming more lower-bite foods, you can eat more overall while sticking to your plan. You can eat as many zero-bite foods as you’d like.
Both Noom and Healthi offer personalized plans based on user inputs and provide a platform for tracking food intake.
Healthi relies on specific plans, such as low-carb diets, and helps users stay accountable to those plans, while Noom focuses on behavior change through daily lessons.
Healthi is an excellent option for users who prefer following specific popular diets and need a tool to track their adherence. It is best suited for self-motivated individuals who can adjust their food intake or diets based on their observed results. Healthi offers both free and PRO versions for an annual fee.
The free version allows you to access some recipes, but you’ll have to upgrade to the Pro version to see them and use Healthi’s meal plans. The free version also has a handy health check feature that lets you track your intake of:
Like Noom, Cronometer teaches you to eat more healthily rather than just track your calories. That's not to say the app can't track calorie intake and calories burned; it can. Cronometer has the standard catalog of health management tools, such as:
In addition to these tools, Cronometer can help you track vitamins and minerals, showing you exactly how much each food contains. You can also create your recipes within the app, which lets you see the calories and nutrients of each food and all of them together as a portioned meal.
This could help you realize how healthier a meal might be by omitting or swapping out the fat source. Or, if you notice the meal is deficient in specific vitamins or minerals, you might be inspired to throw in a few extra veggies.
WW, commonly known by its former name, Weight Watchers, is the best app similar to Noom. Founded in 1963 as a provider of dietary subscription programs, Weight Watchers is a lot older than Noom, and it pioneered many popular diet plans and ideas. The WW app now brings all the features of Weight Watchers straight to your phone.
You may find Weight Watchers more flexible than Noom. Instead of counting calories outright, Weight Watchers uses its proprietary SmartPoints system, which assigns point values to different foods. This system goes beyond simple calories and focuses on the quality of the foods you eat. So, for example, you’ll be able to eat more fruits and vegetables than sugary foods while keeping within my point limit. Some foods in the SmartPoints system don’t have any points at all.
These are called ZeroPoint foods; you can eat as many of them as you’d like. The exact foods included in the list can vary. In general, ZeroPoint foods tend to include items like fruits and vegetables. The thinking here is that eating apples is hard to get fat.
WW also wants you to stay full instead of hungry and miserable all the time. Weight Watchers has now introduced myWW+, which has three different levels. Depending on your level, you may have only around 100 or as many as 300 ZeroPoint Foods in your plan, and your Points budget can vary too.
WW also doesn’t emphasize daily or weekly weigh-ins as Noom does. Weight Watchers is also the best Noom alternative if you need more interaction with your coach.
You can take my weight loss journey beyond the digital and meet coaches and others in person at WW Studios and nationwide meetings. WW has built up this network of studios over the many decades it has been operating.
Nutracheck is a calorie counter and dietary app. With over 300,000 items in the database, uploading calories is as easy as searching for the food you eat and selecting it from the results. You can also scan barcodes or enter calories manually.
The recipe counter is a valuable tool. By entering the ingredients you will be using to make my recipe, I can see the total calorie and fat content for each serving and the recipe total. While Noom allows you to weigh in, Nutracheck takes weigh-ins to a new level. Like a virtual health club, you can weigh in with other members in real-time. It’s a fun activity.
Choose an avatar for the virtual weigh-in, join the queue, stand on your scale, and weigh in when your turn comes around (be mindful of your mental health). The exercise database has 1,000 exercises.
Nutracheck also helps you track six key nutrients:
While Nutracheck is based in the UK and has a support team there, it has also launched a US version for the US app stores and has a US website.
MyPlate, by LiveStrong, is a calorie-counting app with free meal plans and healthy food recommendations. Signing up is easy, as you can use your Google or Facebook account. Start by choosing from one of the available diet styles:
Track your calories manually or scan barcodes to have your data uploaded automatically. In addition to seeing net calories for the day or week, you can view in-depth daily nutrition charts that can help you optimize your diet. Unlike Noom, MyPlate is free to use, though you can upgrade to the Gold plan to enjoy additional perks, such as:
FatSecret is a free app you can use in place of Noom. Tracking calories is effortless, as you can scan barcodes or snap pictures of your foods. The app uses innovative technology to identify the food items in the pictures you take and log their calories. You can maintain a photo diary of the foods you have eaten and a dietary calendar displaying your calorie intake over time.
The exercise calendar will also help you record the calories you burn while working out. With a supportive community and a helpful phone widget, FatSecret is one of the best ways to stay on track and attain my fitness goals. You can even share my diet, exercise, and weight loss progress with my dietitian or healthcare professional using FatSecret Professional. While FatSecret is free, the premium plan will give you access to unique meal plans for different diet styles:
Nutritionix is another first-class alternative to Noom if you’re unsatisfied with Noom’s database, especially if you eat out often. With over 180,000 restaurant items on the Nutritionix database and hundreds of thousands of grocery and everyday items, you can go shopping or eat out regularly and still track your calories.
According to Nutritionix, 95% of typical grocery items in the United States are included, and over 750 US restaurant chain menus are in the database. If you don’t see an item, simply scan the barcode, snap some pictures, and submit it to the team for review—it will be added within a few days.
One useful Nutritionix feature is exporting your data in a spreadsheet. Unlike Noom, Nutritionix is free to use, though you can upgrade to the premium version to share my stats with your dietitian or trainer.
Another free Noom alternative is YAZIO, which has over 1,500 tailor-made recipes. YAZIO is also more optimized than Noom for intermittent fasters, with a free fasting tracker that supports different intermittent fasting schedules. Both hourly and daily intermittent fasting schedules are supported. Some popular hourly fasting schedules include 12:12 and 16:8, while some popular weekly schedules include 5:2 and 6:1.
The OMAD plan—One Meal A Day—is also supported. There are over 20 fasting meal plans, and the food database covers 95% of foods in the United States, according to YAZIO. Four million foods are in the database, making the YAZIO database slightly larger than Noom’s.
Each product in the YAZIO database comes with a rating, and it’s easy to build recipes and meal plans. The app also helps you track your water intake, and best of all, you can get started for free without registering.
Another app you can use to get expert coach guidance and weight loss help is HealthifyMe. It’s excellent for goals like weight loss, muscle gain, and improving your eating habits overall. Unlike Noom, HealthifyMe lets you get started with a free consultation with a certified diet coach. You can chat with the coach on the app or via WhatsApp, giving you more communication flexibility. If you sign up for one-on-one coaching, you can choose periods of three months, six months, or one year. If you don’t want to talk with a health coach, don’t worry.
HealthifyMe has something called Ria, an AI-powered health coach. Using machine learning, Ria has accumulated enough data from over 500 million food logs and 20 million messages to help you advance in your weight loss journey. Ria can be your coach for 3-12 months.
HealthifyMe also goes beyond live coaching and introduces live workout classes performed over the internet. If working out with other people helps you stay motivated, but you don’t have time to leave home, you can join these virtual classes—it’s just an option you won’t get from Noom. Of course, HealthifyMe has the standard calorie counting, water counting, and meal plan features you can expect from a calorie counter app.
Fitamate is a leading weight loss app that provides weight loss support coaches that give you 1:1 coaching via its app. Similarities FitMateCoach and Noom offer tools and resources that help you look at lifestyle and behaviors affecting your weight loss journey.
Both are not focused on calorie counting but offer a more holistic approach to weight loss. Fitmate and Noom provide personalized weight loss plans, tools, and resources, such as recipes and actionable tips to help users achieve their goals.
Differences FitMateCoach offers daily interaction with a 1:1 coach via a conversational app for better accountability, motivation, and support. Noom focuses more on daily behavior change and psychology lessons without a coach. They provide a weekly behavior coaching session for an extra $150 per month plus a one-time $19 fee for joining the behavior coaching program on top of the regular subscription.
FitMateCoach is excellent if you need the additional support and accountability that comes with daily interaction with a coach. This is particularly effective if you struggle with self-motivation and could use that extra cheerleader and accountability partner.
Cal AI is an innovative app that transforms how we track nutrition and calories. Using advanced artificial intelligence technology, Cal AI can analyze a photo of your food and instantly provide accurate food content details on:
Cal AI combines your phone's depth sensor with powerful AI models to analyze food volume, identify ingredients, and present nutritional information in seconds. Cal AI makes nutrition tracking effortless with the following:
If you've ever spent time logging calories manually, you know how tedious it can be. With Cal AI, the days of manually logging calories in dull, complicated apps are gone. Simply take a picture of your food and let Cal AI do the rest.
Cal AI offers many features to help users accurately track their nutrition. First, the app provides quick, accurate estimates of calories and other macronutrients to help users reach their fitness goals. Users can scan:
Cal AI also generates personalized insights based on users' tracking history. These insights help users understand their eating habits and make healthier choices. For example, if you regularly scan foods high in sugar, Cal AI might recommend alternatives to help you reach your goals. The app also sends smart reminders to encourage consistent tracking.
