Fooducate can help you make healthier food choices during this Thanksgiving Thanksgiving is a time to reflect and give thanks and enjoy a wonderful meal with those that we love most, but I find it's also one of the toughest times to stay on course with my diet. With all of the planning, shopping, decorating, and cooking, keeping track of what I eat and making healthy choices seems like one more task on my long turkey-day to-do list. Between picking up nutmeg for my pumpkin pie and pears for the stuffing, counting calories tends to slip down to last place on my list. Thankfully, there are several apps available that do the work for you, so you can take calorie counting off the list but still keep track of health and fitness goals during the holiday. Below are five best free apps for Thanksgiving.
Related: 10 Top Turkey Tips
1. Lose It. This free app takes the guess work out of Thanksgivings dinner. It features an easy to use recipe calculator and a barcode scanner that allows you to scan in items with your phone's camera as you shop. Create a recipe with the items scanned in and enter the amount of servings, and Lose It calculates the nutritional information per serving. Featuring an easy to use interface, you can also log in your daily food intake and Lose It will total the calories and macro-nutrients like fat, protein, and carbohydrates. Enter your weight and target weight, and the app will calculate your recommended daily calorie intake and track your daily and long-term progress.
2. My Fitness Pal. Don't have time to scan and shop? With over two million food items in the database, this free app comes with a library of food that also features well-known brands found in the supermarket. As on Lost It, you can log in your daily intake and the app also remembers favorite foods and meals, so that you don't have to access the entire library every time you're logging items in. Use the food database to create recipes, then create a profile and fully sync with the web to print and share your favorite Thanksgiving recipes with friends and family. This app also works offline, which is great for holiday travels.
Related: Our Tastiest Thanksgiving Recipes
3. Calorie Counter. Want to eat healthier during the holidays, but don't have the time to research nutritional information? The Calorie Counter features a nutrition grade, pros/cons, and a nutritional analysis report for each food item in easy to read charts, so you can compare the nutritional value of different foods from your phone and make healthier choices. The Logging-by-voice feature allows you to log in your meals hands free, which is great if you're on the go. Although the app is free, the Logging-by-voice feature is only free for a limited time after registration. The three calorie counting apps above also feature free access to online communities. Members share weight loss tips, recipes, progress reports, and motivational support.
4. Fooducate. Like Calorie Counter, Fooducate also features a nutrition grade for products, but if you're short on time this app is ideal because it allows you to create a healthy shopping list too. Compare items and add the healthier choice to your shopping list along with everything else you need for a quick and easy Thanksgiving dinner. Before heading out, choose from items in the database, or items already scanned at home and place them on the list to avoid straying into the snack aisle and wasting your shopping time.
Related: 60-Minute Thanksgiving Dinner Plan
5. Fitness Buddy. If you're finding that Thanksgiving dinner preparations have taken over your life and you can't make it to the gym, the fitness buddy is a great app that helps you squeeze in a quick workout. You can create a routine from a library of exercises with HD-quality pictures and videos, in-depth explanations on proper execution, and bodyweight exercises, which is great if you need to work out at home and don't own weights.
Thanks to these apps, staying fit and healthy for Thanksgiving is quick and easy, which means you have get to more time to spend doing what you love most-enjoying Thanksgiving dinner with friends and family.
How do you keep your diet on track during the holidays? Let me know in the comments!
-by Darlene Feliciano
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