Studies support the idea that keeping track of your diet, exercise and health goals can help you form healthy habits and support weight loss. And in our ever-digital world, you don’t need to do this via pen and paper.
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People who want to lose weight can download a variety of calorie trackers and weight loss apps to use on their computer or phone. Some apps are free, while others are offered via paid subscriptions. And some provide more support than others.
Most apps also provide support for specific eating plans, like vegan or keto. Depending on where you are on your weight loss journey, you may benefit from one of the apps we’ve reviewed.
Top Weight Loss Apps Selection Criteria
Achieving healthy weight loss can feel more like running a marathon than a sprint — it takes time. As such, whether or not a weight loss app is right for you may depend on how far along you are in your journey and what goals you are hoping to accomplish along the way. This list of apps can give you an idea of the type of support systems weight loss apps have to offer, and which ones feed your individual needs.
Apps were analyzed based on the following factors:
— Calorie counting, which includes adding up the calories in the foods you eat each day.
— Exercise tracking, which offers a space for you to record your daily workouts or physical activity.
— Visual food diary, which allows users to photograph food choices instead of writing them out.
— Intermittent fasting timer, which serves as a clock that users can start and stop between meals.
— Live coaching, which offers users the opportunity to interact one-on-one with a human coach, who may or may not be a registered dietitian or health professional.
— Telehealth component, which can include one-on-one meetings with a medical doctor or registered dietitian.
— Price.
Read on for info on weight loss apps that are best for individual clinician support, medication to supplement your goals, enthusiastic coaching, self-managed tracking, food guidance or workout monitoring.
[READ: How Many Calories Should You Eat A Day?]
Our 7 Top Picks
— Best for clinician-supported weight loss: FORM.
— Best for medication-backed weight loss: Found.
— Best for self-managed weight loss: MyFitnessPal.
— Best for coached weight loss: Noom.
— Best for intermittent fasting: Zero.
— Best for overall tracking: MyNetDiary.
— Best for weight loss without counting calories: Ate Food Journal.
Comparing the Best Weight Loss Apps
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[READ: How to Calculate Weight Loss Percentage.]
Do Weight Loss Apps Actually Help You Lose Weight?
You can download just about any app on your phone. But if you don’t interact with it, it likely won’t have a big impact on your life. The same goes for weight loss apps. No matter which app you choose, how much you commit to using it may determine your success. (An alternative to weight loss apps are weight loss betting apps
, which provide a financial incentive to lose weight. )
Frequently interacting with a weight loss app and incorporating its tools into your exercise and eating habits may support weight loss in some people — whereas occasionally checking the app while sticking with your old habits probably won’t have such a profound impact.
“It’s all about where your head is at and your commitment to your journey,” says Nadine Gregory, a registered dietitian and general manager of Food & Nutrition for Sodexo at Sharp Healthcare in San Diego, California. “At the end of the day, you need to pick an app that will motivate you to stick to it and not feel like a chore. The great thing is, there are so many options out there to explore.”
How to Choose the Best Weight Loss App for You
When choosing an app that’s right for you, you’ll want to assess your mental headspace, weight-loss goals and the level of support you think you’ll need.
Some questions you may want to ask yourself include:
What can I afford?
Some apps are free, some come with pricing plans and others are covered by insurance. Take a look at your bank account before pulling out your credit card, to make sure the app you want is within your budget.
Do I have any dietary or exercise restrictions?
Some people who are diagnosed with a clinical disease or disorder may be advised to follow specific diets or limit their exercise to support their body.
If you are also medically advised to lose weight — such as before a surgery or before undergoing fertility treatments — you may need more assistance than can be provided on a standard app. In these cases, working with a clinician on a telehealth app or sticking to in-person visits with your provider may be better options.
How much support do I want?
Some apps provide users with a coach, registered dietitian or even medical doctor to offer support. Others provide a structure for you to work through your goals independently, while some provide a robust online community. Ask yourself how many people you want to be involved in your journey.
What have I already tried?
Whether you tried a fad diet, workout plan or another app, chances are the method didn’t work the way you hoped it would. Consider what you disliked about your last approach and opt for something new.
Do I medically need to lose weight?
A lot of people who download weight loss apps do not actually need to lose weight — and shedding pounds could put their bodies in a vulnerable environment. So before you start tracking calories, ask yourself if this is safe and healthy for you.
The best way to assess if you need to lose weight or not is to check in with your doctor. You can also assess your weight on the body mass index, or BMI scale, which gives suggested weight ranges for varying heights. A BMI between 18.6 and 24.9 is considered normal and 18.5 or lower is underweight, meaning if you fall in those categories, a weight loss app could be harmful to you.
It’s important not to rely too strongly on the BMI scale, however, as many doctors have criticized it as an outdated or unreliable tool to assess healthy weight. It doesn’t, for example, consider factors like muscle mass, bone density or overall body composition. So, if your BMI falls in the overweight category, that does not guarantee you need to lose weight.
If a doctor recommends you lose weight or if you notice your weight serves as a barrier to hobbies or activities you enjoy, dropping some pounds could be a healthy option for you — and using a weight loss app is one way to start.
[SEE: How to Lose Weight: the Best Foods for Weight Loss]
Best Weight Loss Apps
1. FORM: Best for clinician-supported weight loss.
2. Found: Best for medication-backed weight loss.
3. MyNetDiary: Best for overall tracking.
4. MyFitnessPal: Best for self-managed weight loss.
5. Noom: Best for coached weight loss and support.
6. Zero: Best for intermittent fasting.
7. Ate Food Journal: Best for weight loss without counting calories.
FORM: Best for clinician-supported weight loss
Price
: Covered by most insurance companies and Medicare, though you will be responsible for any copay or deductible. The company also offers a self-pay plan for $199 per month, which is FSA/HSA eligible. Additional fees may apply.
FORM is a clinician-supported telehealth app that offers weight loss tools and obesity care. The service is covered by most insurance plans in 49 states for people who medically need to lose weight. Services are not covered in Louisiana, where state regulations prevent obesity treatment through telemedicine.
FORM offers a range of services, including:
— Telehealth check-ins with a medical provider.
— In-app weigh-ins using a scale that syncs directly with the platform.
— Nutrition advice and calorie tracking.
— Exercise logging.
— Clinician-prescribed weight loss medication through telehealth, for some people.
“Our app really leverages the connection between patients and clinicians,” says Dr. Florencia Halperin, an endocrinologist and chief medical officer of FORM.
FORM operates under the four pillars framework of the obesity community, which emphasizes the importance of nutrition, physical activity, mindset and medication in losing weight. Additionally, providers on the app treat obesity as a chronic disease with the goal of providing sustainable support to patients.
“We work with the belief that obesity is a disease that has a lot of underlying biological factors, including genetics,” Halperin says. “You need to use as many evidence-based tools as you can to help people be successful for the long term.”
Found: Best for medication-backed weight loss
Price: $99 per month, on average.
Found is a clinician-supported weight loss app that prescribes medication for weight loss. The company only treats patients who have a BMI of 30 or over, or who have a BMI of 27 to 30 if also experiencing a comorbid chronic condition.
Found clients undergo a telehealth assessment with a physician and can be prescribed safe weight loss medications. Through their app, Found provides clients with coaches to support them in nutritional health, emotional health, sleep hygiene and movement.
The goal is to provide support for people along with medication, which should be individualized to each client, says Found’s chief medical officer Dr. Rekha Kumar, a practicing endocrinologist in New York City.
“A weight loss app should also feature personalized treatments around every factor that makes someone unique — including their biology, medical history, mental health, existent lifestyle, goals and more,” Kumar says.
She adds that she sees weight loss apps and telehealth care as ways to expand obesity care to out-of-reach populations, both financially and geographically. Found is priced differently based on different people’s needs and plans, with an average cost of $99 a month.
MyNetDiary: Best for overall tracking
Price: $8.99 per month or $59.99 per year (plus $3.99 to download from the app store). There is also a free version with limited features, plus $3.99 to download.
MyNetDiary is a comprehensive food, movement, medication and wellness tracker that can help you get a full picture of how your nutrition and exercise is impacting your health. The app supplies users with an easy-to-navigate dashboard with sections where you can input notes and metrics about meals, exercise, steps taken, water drinking habits, groceries, medications, weight and more.
In the meal and nutrition tracking section, the app provides information on total calorie count and nutrient and macronutrient numbers — like total fat, carbs and proteins, as well as sodium levels, calcium levels and more. You can input your weight and calorie goals, and the app will analyze how well you’ve been following these. The free version comes with limited features.
MyFitnessPal: Best for self-managed weight loss
Price: $19.99 per month or $79.99 per year for the premium version. There is also a free version with limited features.
Available in 99 countries and 18 different languages — and carrying data on the calorie content of more than 14 million foods — MyFitnessPal is accessible to people following a range of dietary patterns. Further, it was ranked as the top weight loss app and third-best wellness app in 2023 in a recent survey by finance company Tipalti, which cited the app’s high revenue and more than 800,000 downloads as two reasons behind its placement.
MyFitnessPal is a free calorie-tracking app with the option to subscribe to a paid premium version for a more personalized experience. In both versions of the app, users input their weight loss goals and receive advice for how to structure their meals and exercise to meet those goals. You can also keep track of your workout routines, food intake and water intake to assess your progress. When inputting food and exercise, MyFitnessPal helps calculate your caloric intake (what you’re eating) and outtake (what you’re burning).
MyFitnessPal Premium offers additional features like a barcode scan — where you can scan foods for calorie content rather than log them manually — and customized macro tracking — where you can not only view your caloric totals but the percentage of calories you are eating from protein, fat and carbs. The premium version also comes with more meal plan options, access to advice from a registered dietitian (RDN), intermittent fasting support and an ad-free experience.
While MyFitnessPal Premium comes with advice from an RDN, the free version does not offer this kind of professional support. So, if using this app, you’ll want to be careful that the goals you set for yourself are healthy and realistic. It’s smart to check in with a medical doctor or RDN before or during use.
Noom: Best for coached weight loss and support
Price: $70 for a monthly auto-renew plan or $209 for an annual auto-renewal plan, with the option for a pay-what-you-wish 7-14 day trial. Noom offers different rates for 1- to 12-month auto-renewal plans.
Noom users receive customized weight loss plans that last about 16 weeks, but can vary based on individual needs, according to Noom’s website. Plans tend to support a 1- to 2-pound weight loss per week, which is considered a healthy and safe rate of weight loss.
Users also receive diet and exercise advice, check-ins with a human coach and daily lessons rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy and stress management theories. The company says that these lessons are rooted in science and can help users understand their current food or exercise habits and support change.
While recipes on Noom are vetted by registered dietitians, Noom coaches do not have to uphold the credentials of medical doctors or RDNs. Instead, they’re asked to have a bachelor’s degree in a related field of study, or an associate’s degree if supplemented with 2,000 hours of wellness experience. All coaches complete a “Noomiversity” course, which is the company’s version of a health coach training program, before working with clients.
So, if you are looking for medical support on your weight loss journey, you may be better off opting for clinician-focused apps like Found or FORM. If you can afford it, you could also consider working with an RDN instead of or alongside Noom.
Zero: Best for intermittent fasting
Price: $9.99 per month or $69.99 per year. There is also a free version with limited features.
Intermittent fasting is an eating pattern that cycles between periods of fasting and eating. The weight loss app Zero is an intermittent fasting app that helps users keep track of the time they are not eating. The app does this through a fasting timer which users start and stop after they have a meal until they eat again. It records progress so that you can see how closely you are currently adhering to a fasting plan compared with where you were the day before, or where you were when you first downloaded the app.
In addition to recording fasting timeframes, Zero says its user experience can cater to the full four pillars of health — which the company defines as nutrition (and fasting), activity, sleep and restoration. Users can record their daily experience navigating these pillars in the app’s habit tracker.
In the habit tracker, you can input meals, mood, physical activity, hours of sleep and hours of mindfulness practice. The app provides goals for these categories, such as how many hours to fast a day or how many hours of exercise to get in. You can customize these goals.
You can assess how closely you’ve met your goals in the habit tracker through the “loop.” The loop is a feature in the Zero app that looks like the outline of a bubble-letter O. It fills up with different colors depending on how closely you’ve met goals in each habit-tracker section.
You can also input data on your weight into Zero, or sync Zero with wearable health apps, like FitBit.
Ate Food Journal: Best for weight loss without counting calories
Price: $9.99 per month or $48 per year.
Ate Food Journal is a visual food log for people to record what they ate in a day. Rather than type in what you ate or log calories, Ate users snap a photo of their meal and upload it to the app. According to the company, Ate is a place to “pause to reflect on what, where, when, and why you ate.”
Ate Food Journal, formerly known as You Ate, offers space for you to input your feelings around the food, such as answering the question, “Why did I eat?” with answers like “Hungry,” “Social,” “It was time,” “Stressed,” “Tired,” “Bored” and others. You can also input data points like how the food made you feel (answering with emojis), who you ate with and if your meal was “#onpath” or “#offpath” of your goal. The app does not determine your goals for you, or hold you accountable for being on or off. That’s up to you.
Ate may be best suited for people who want to be more mindful about their food choices but don’t want to fret about calorie counting or obsessive tracking. It might be less effective for people who are looking for external sources of accountability or medical assistance.
Bottom Line
Weight loss apps can be helpful tools for people who need to lose weight for health reasons. Assessing your medical status, mental health and weight goals, as well as asking yourself if you value personal support from a registered dietitian or coach, or if you would rather begin your journey on your own, can help you decide what type of app is best for you.
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Best Weight Loss Apps According to Experts originally appeared on usnews.com
Update 01/17/24: This story was published at an earlier date and has been updated with new information.
