The Best Apps for Weight Loss: Diet Plan Tools, Fitness Trackers, and More

The best apps for weight loss let you chart your food intake and document exercise, says Reshmi Srinath, MD, director of the Mount Sinai Weight and Metabolism Management Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Lose It! excels in this regard, she says. “I really appreciate the weekly look at my calorie budget because it helped teach me that even if I had an off day here and there, if I looked at my calories as a weekly budget, I could still achieve my weight loss goals,” says Chaunie Brusie, RN, in Everyday Health’s Lose It! review.

You track food using the barcode scanner or by taking a photo of your plate. The premium version also provides advanced nutrition features like custom insights based on what you track and the ability to sync your fitness data from your smartwatch or other fitness apps.

Editor’s Note: Everyday Health owns Lose It!

Noom is popular because of its focus on psychology and behavior change. The app connects you with a personal coach and focuses heavily on the behind-the-scenes psychological and emotional reasons you may be overeating. With the app, you can log food and find recipes, health insights, psychology lessons, and a community.

Found is a comprehensive online weight loss system that includes access to medical professionals, biological testing, prescription weight loss medications, and more to create a personalized weight loss plan that goes beyond overhauling your eating and exercise habits. The Found app focuses on sustainable changes vetted by weight loss experts and is tailored to your lifestyle and health goals. Use the app, which syncs with other health trackers, to connect with your weight loss coach and keep track of movement, nutrition, sleep, stress, and more.

Found also accepts insurance from major insurers like Cigna, Anthem, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, and Blue Cross Blue Shield.

The Simple app is an intermittent fasting (IF) and weight loss app designed to help you understand your habits and teach you how to build healthier ones. It’s great for novice and experienced fasters who want to eat healthy but don’t want to track calories. The app helps you create a fasting schedule that works for you and can be adjusted as needed. It also includes an “Explore” section with guides, workout plans, recipes, and educational videos. “One particular feature of the Simple app that stood out to me is the neutral language around food. The nutrition analyzer promotes positive feedback and supports building a healthy relationship with food, which I find so much value in for promoting sustainable and healthy change,” says Katie Olzewski, a Dallas-based registered dietitian.

You don’t have to get fancy with tracking your fitness. Tiffany Wright, PhD, founder of Skinny Coach in Los Angeles, recommends using a pedometer (step counter). These apps have useful visuals that help you see what you’ve accomplished in a given time period, says Dr. Wright. StepsApp can sync with your preferred tracker or smartphone to show you how many steps you take in a day, week, and month. Along with your steps, the app converts steps to calories burned, hours active, and miles covered. These features help you earn badges as you check off goals and track your progress toward your target weight.

“Don’t feel like you need to overhaul your entire life starting immediately. Assess where you are currently, and then figure out where you’d like to be in the future. A great starting point for people new to exercise is to get a step counter and see how much you walk on a normal day,” says Esther Avant, a sports nutritionist based in San Diego.

If you’re following a specific diet — keto, paleo, or high-protein — this is the app for you. It’s a calorie counter, so you can log food to track your macronutrients and micronutrients to avoid nutrient deficiencies while trying to lose weight. If you’re following a form of intermittent fasting, there’s also a timer to track your eating and fasting times. The app contains a barcode scanner so you can add packaged foods, a database for logging meals from restaurants, and a recipe logger so you can save your favorite meal ideas.

Cronometer syncs with Apple Watch, Apple Health, Oura Ring, and Fitbit and is loaded with tools that can drill down on your daily nutrition in detail — it can even analyze essential mineral intake — all of which is great for people who want to get a robust, clear picture of what they’re eating daily. However, it could feel overwhelming for people who prefer fewer bells and whistles.

When you want a library of on-demand and live workouts, FitOn is the app you need. Access is free and includes workouts with celebrity trainers in every category imaginable, including Pilates, yoga, and high-intensity interval training (HIIT). There are also customized workout plans that can help you reach your goals and a live leaderboard with the ability to message friends to keep you accountable and motivated. Beyond breaking a sweat, the FitOn app also includes mindfulness and meditation routines so you can exercise your mind, too.

These medications mimic the action of an incretin hormone, or gut peptide, called GLP-1, which is secreted by the small intestine. “This hormone plays a crucial role in managing our insulin levels and blood sugar and sends signals back to our brain to tell us that we’re full,” says Michelle Pearlman, MD, an obesity medicine specialist at Prime Institute in Coral Gables, Florida.

The highly ranked program is focused on 30 days of workouts, but it also offers a meal plan, nutrition tracking, and low-calorie diets. Because it suggests workouts you can complete and check off every day (instead of you deciding what you’re going to do and then putting it into the app), it can help you stick to a full month of activity. Plus, workouts offer video guidance, so all fitness levels can follow along and get a great sweat session. Info can be synced with Google Fit or Apple Health, making it easy to keep all your data in one place.