-
Eating a balanced diet can be tough. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to lose a few pounds, maintain weight, or track macronutrients; counting calories is an important part of the process. In addition to tracking your intake, those with dietary restrictions or food allergies need to keep a close eye on what’s in their food. Even with an app, the tricky part can be accurately tracking your calories and where they’re coming from and monitoring ingredients. However, a calorie counter or tracking app with a mobile device/tablet camera (otherwise known as a food barcode scanner or tracker) makes this process much easier and more efficient by scanning a UPC (Universal Product Code) barcode or the food itself. Let’s look at how food barcode trackers work and why using an app that has one can help you stick to your nutrition plan.
-
Related Topics
How Do Food Scanners Work?
We all see the cashier scan barcodes or slide our food items across the red lasers when grocery shopping. It makes sense that the special laser will read the barcode and “talk” with the register’s system to look up the item. But how does it work with an app when your phone doesn’t have a laser to read a barcode? Instead, the app uses the mobile device/tablet camera to scan the images of the food or the UPC barcode. Machine learning will recognize the images and UPC barcodes and match them to a food database. This makes it easier and more accurate than entering each food or ingredient manually.
Once the food/barcode is scanned into your food scanner app, it cross-references an expansive database of food items to suggest something that matches it. A food barcode scanner is the easiest and most accurate way to find the right food item in the database. Of course, you can manually search for an item, but you’ll sometimes get the wrong product recommended because apps like MyFitnessPal allow users to add food items. Diligence is required on the your part to ensure you’re not inputting the wrong item into your food diary. A food tracker app with a barcode scanner ensures accuracy.
Why Use a Food Tracker?
If you’re trying to count calories, you can always do it the old-fashioned way and look at the food item’s nutrition label, calculate your caloric intake based on the serving size and your portion, and then write it down in a notebook. This can be effective in helping you track your food intake. But if you’re trying to stay within a specific window for your calorie count, you’ll need to do math throughout the day to keep track of your caloric intake. Food barcode trackers make it easy by letting you scan an item to create an entry in your food journal and doing the rest of the heavy lifting for you. When you scan a barcode into your app, you can pull up the information and add it to your food diary with a few taps on your screen. The food barcode scanner app adds the calories to your daily intake total, making it easier to monitor throughout the day.
Anyone who has dietary restrictions due to food allergies or intolerances understands the importance of tracking their food. When you’re trying to avoid certain ingredients, a free calorie counter app with a barcode scanner is a great way to get additional information about ingredients on a label. With a simple scan, you can easily access accurate ingredient information.
Assist in Meal Prepping
Meal prepping is a great way to help stick to your nutrition plan. But suppose you’re trying to log every ingredient in your meal. In that case, it can be time consuming to calculate the portions of your favorite sauce, your preferred protein, vegetables, and anything else you’re including. Scan the barcode of whatever you’re adding to your meal prep app and let it add everything together for you. Then, you can save the meal in your app and add it to your tracker every time you eat. Not only do tracking apps make it easy to count your calories, but they also can help you find delicious meal prep ideas to mix things up a bit.
Better, Healthier Living
Getting accurate nutrition information is one of the most important ways to ensure you meet your wellness goals, particularly if you have any dietary restrictions, such as with foods high in sugar, salt, or fat. If you’re counting your salad as 150 calories because that’s what the entry on your tracking app said, but you’re really eating around 450 calories, that can be a significant difference! You’ll probably start to wonder why you’re not meeting your other goals. It’s never a bad idea to do some of your own research on the nutritional content of certain food items before you add them to your food diary. Once you’ve found the database entry that matches what you’ve found, you can accurately add that item when you eat it. Remember that while the app’s developers add some entries, other entries are added by users who might be doing it incorrectly.
Effective and Sustainable Weight Loss
While fad diets can sometimes lead to quick and (sometimes) easier results, it’s normal for the results to fade after a little time. Effective and sustainable weight loss comes with creating new habits. Using a meal prep app during your journey can help you create lasting habits that make for healthy choices and sustainable results. Yes, it can take time to lose weight, but remember that it also took time to gain weight. So, be patient with yourself and your progress and use your food tracker app to help you break old habits and make (and keep) new ones.
