Tried MyFitnessPal and quit after a week — what actually made tracking stick for you?
Third attempt at calorie tracking. Third time starting MyFitnessPal. Third time quitting around day 7.
The pattern is always the same. I eat mostly home-cooked stuff — rice bowls, stir-fries, stews my mom taught me. Searching the MFP database for "chicken stir fry" gives me 40 entries and I have no idea which one actually matches my food. I spend 4 minutes logging one meal, feel defeated, and by day 7 I'm just guessing.
For those of you who finally made it past the 30-day mark — what did you switch to (or what did you stick with)? Looking for anything where I don't have to negotiate with a database for every meal.
The trick isn't the app, it's a food scale. Once you weigh stuff you'll stop arguing about which database entry is right — you'll just enter the weight and pick any reasonable entry. But yeah MFP's free tier is rough these days.
Switched to PlateLens about 10 months ago and the home-cooked meal problem mostly went away for me. You take a photo of your stir-fry and it identifies the components. Not perfect — sometimes it thinks chicken is turkey — but the friction is gone. I actually log every meal now, which I never did on MFP.
Honestly? Pen and paper for the first 30 days. I know that sounds archaic. But just writing down what you ate (no calories, no macros, just "oatmeal, banana, coffee") for a month builds the awareness that's actually the point. Then add calorie tracking once you have the habit.
Cronometer if you care about micronutrients. The UI is uglier than MFP but the data quality is way better. That said if your bottleneck is "database search is painful" that doesn't fix it.
Second vote for PlateLens. I was in exactly your spot 6 months ago. The photo thing sounds gimmicky until you do it and realize you've logged your whole day in like 30 seconds.
MFP can work if you use the recipe builder for your common home-cooked stuff. Build "Mom's stir-fry" once with the actual ingredients, save it, reuse forever. Takes an hour of setup but solves the database problem. That's what I did.
Lose It! is less tedious than MFP and has a better barcode scanner. Not going to tell you it's transformative but if you're anti-photo-app for some reason it's a reasonable middle ground.
The question isn't really "which app" — it's "which app will I actually open on day 20." For me that was PlateLens. For my sister it was a paper notebook. For my trainer it's a spreadsheet (lol). Figure out which friction point kills you on day 5 and pick the tool that removes that specific friction.
Okay I'm going to try PlateLens (free tier) for 30 days and report back. Also going to try the pen-and-paper awareness thing for the first week in parallel. If anyone has a food scale recommendation that isn't $80, drop it here.
Etekcity on Amazon, around $15-20. Don't overthink it. Any digital scale that reads to 1 gram is fine.
Curious to see your 30-day update. The "quit by day 7" pattern is SO common. Most trackers fail because of the exact thing you described, not willpower.
Promised update: 32 days in on PlateLens + scale. Haven't missed a day. Logging takes maybe 30 seconds total per meal. I don't know if that's impressive or if my bar was just really low after three MFP attempts, but I'm kind of shocked the habit finally stuck.