Your Nutrition Tracking App Sucks
“But I eat only 1800 calories a day.” I hear from so many clients, who are frustrated that they are not losing weight. They mistakenly blame their metabolism, their age, or some kind of obscure medical problem, but the issue is really much simpler: they’re eating more than they think.
After they tell me the number of calories that they think they eat per day, my next question is always “how do you know? How did you calculate your daily calories?”
Almost always, they tell me some popular nutrition tracking app — whether it’s MyFitnessPal, Noom, MyPlate, LoseIt or others.
And that’s where the problem lies — they’re all bad. Really, really bad.
One study compared the accuracy of 5 different popular nutrition tracking apps with just a good ol’ food diary, and found that the nutrition tracking apps underestimated calories by as much as 27%.
Another study found similar results.
And the vast majority of research that compares nutrition tracking apps basically finds the same thing: they are way way way off (study 1, study 2, study 3, study 4… do I need to go on?).
A lot of us lie to ourselves (and nutrition apps lie to us) about how much we’re actually eating. We think we’re eating 1800 calories per day, and we wonder why we aren’t losing…
