Calorie Tracker Review: Calorie Counting on the Go!

While it may not be for everyone, keeping track of caloric intake is a great way for many of us to better understand what we’re putting into our bodies.  LIVESTRONG.com is one of the leading online communities where the health conscious come together to track their diets, their fitness, and challenge each other accordingly.  If you’re looking to keep tabs on how you’re treating your body, there aren’t many places better.  Now thanks to the Calorie Tracker by LIVESTRONG.com iPhone app, you can keep track of those meals and jogging session even when you’re away from your computer.

The Calorie Tracker app links directly to your LIVESTRONG.com account and syncs data between the two, allowing users to literally take their LIVESTRONG account with them wherever they go.  To understand what this app offers, it’s important to understand a little bit about the website it’s based on.  Unlike other nutrition calculators, both online and on the iPhone, LIVESTRONG offers an open nutrition database.  This means that if a member can’t find a food they’ve consumed in the database, they can add it themselves.  Once approved, that food becomes available to all members as part of the database.  Kind of like a wiki for food facts.

Every chain restaurant, brand of food, or generic item you can think of is listed (and if it’s not, you can fix that).  That’s a big part of what makes LIVESTRONG so great.  The other big factor is how detailed the stat tracking is.  A user has access to numerous graphs and tables to show them exactly what they’ve been consuming and how their diet has improved or deteriorated over time.  You can even track your daily fitness, and the system will help you to use that activity to calculate your net calories for the day rather than just your consumed ones.

Why is it so important to know so much about LIVESTRONG.com?  Because without that knowledge you might not realize just how limited the Calorie Tracker really is.  Sure you have access to their seemingly limitless nutrition database, but if what you’re eating isn’t in there don’t expect to add new foods from the app.  And while the Calorie Breakdown provided gives you a good guide on how many calories you have left to consume in a given day, it doesn’t provide anywhere near the depth of information that the actual website does.  Want to know how much fat you’ve taken in?  How about fiber?  The app doesn’t tell you that, even though that information is readily available on the website.

Another problem: if you’re on an iPod touch, you’re pretty much out of luck.  Despite other apps somehow cramming a massive database into a tiny app file (see MovieBrain) Calorie Tacker by LIVESTRONG.com has decided it best to keep their central database available via internet connection only.  That’s not to say that iPod Touch owners can’t use the app.  In fact, certain tweaks make the app more useable offline than you might expect.  If you’ve eaten a food or completed an exercise before, it should be available locally, having been saved in the app prior.  If you’re eating the same foods on a daily basis (and many people do), the app should only provide occassional inconveniences when attempting to track your meals.  Any foods that you need the database for can always be accessed the next time you’re at a WiFi point.

With so much working against it, you might be suprised to hear that this app has our whole-hearted endorsement.  Regardless of how much less it offers than its website companion, it still offers far more than any other nutrition calculator in the App Store.  So long as you’re using this on an iPhone you’ll always have access to their seemingly endless database.  The ability to sync your daily consumption and exercise to a free online account that provides you with tons of statistical data and a strong community makes Calorie Tracker by LIVESTRONG.com an app that’s second to none.  Both as a nutrition calculator and a companion to the LIVESTRONG.com website, it’s an exceptional offering.  We’d have liked to have seen more of the info that the site offers as well as an offline database, but asides from these minor complaints there’s really very little room for improvement.

Calorie Tracker by LIVESTRONG.com is available for $2.99 on the App Store.

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