Fitness and calorie
tracker in one app

MyFitnessPal and its rivals are calorie apps first — their "exercise" is a dropdown that returns an estimated burn, not a training log with your sets and weights. Strong and Hevy are real training logs with no food at all. And the calorie burn those food apps hand back is a bad number you are then invited to eat, which is the single most common reason a tracked diet stops working.

Why the category splits in two

Search for an app that does fitness and calories and you get two kinds of answer that pretend to be one kind.

Calorie apps with an exercise field. MyFitnessPal is the obvious one — a food database of some 14 million entries, which is genuinely its strength, plus an exercise list where you choose "running" and a duration and it returns an estimated burn. Cronometer is excellent on micronutrients and does the same thing with training. MacroFactor is smart about adapting your calorie target and is still, fundamentally, a nutrition app.

Training logs with no food. Strong and Hevy are good at what they do. Sets, reps, weight, rest timers, progression over a block. Neither has any idea what you ate, and neither pretends to.

So the person who wants both ends up running one of each, which means the two numbers that explain each other live in two apps that never meet.

The "exercise calories" problem

This deserves singling out, because it is not a missing feature — it is an actively harmful one.

When a calorie app lets you log "weights, 45 minutes" and adds 400 calories back to your budget, it has done two questionable things. The estimate itself is poor: calorie burn from a duration and a body weight is a guess with very wide error bars, and resistance training in particular is badly modelled. And then it presents that guess to you as food you have earned.

If the estimate is 40 percent high — entirely normal — you eat back a few hundred calories a day that you never burned, and a carefully tracked deficit quietly becomes maintenance. People then conclude that tracking does not work for them. Tracking worked fine. The exercise-calorie feature undid it.

The better design is to set a target that already accounts for how much you train, and to log training for progression rather than for a refund.

What a real training log needs

If an app is going to claim the fitness half, the test is simple: can it answer "am I getting stronger?"

• Every set, with its own weight and reps. Not "bench press, 45 minutes". Three sets at 80 kg and three at 60 kg are different sessions and only one of them is progress.
• The right question per exercise. A plank is seconds. A run is distance and pace. A squat is weight and reps. An app that asks every movement for reps will ask a plank how many times you did it.
• Progression you can see across weeks, per lift, not a calendar of ticks.
• Runs with distance, pace and route, because most people who lift also run, and a 10 km is not "cardio, 55 minutes".

What a real food log needs

• Fast entry, or you will stop within a fortnight. Barcode, photo and search all need to work.
• Portions in the units you actually eat — two slices, one katori, three rotis — not a gram figure you had to estimate and will not remember.
• Protein visible, not buried under calories. If you are training, it is the number that decides whether the training turns into anything.
• Editable afterwards. Every log has wrong entries in it. Being able to fix one without deleting and re-adding it is the difference between a log you trust and one you abandon.

Why one app rather than two

It is not about tidiness. It is that the interesting questions live in the overlap and neither app can see it:

• Your bench stalled for three weeks — were you also 400 calories a day under, with protein at half what it should be?
• Your recovery score has been flat for a fortnight — is that training load, or is it the deficit you started at the same time?
• You feel terrible on Thursdays — is that Wednesday's session or Wednesday's eating?

Every one of those is answerable in a minute if the data sits together, and effectively unanswerable if it does not. That is the whole argument for an all-in-one, and it is not a convenience argument.

The recommendation

For tracking fitness and calories together, NutriMacro is the best app, because it is the only one that does both halves properly rather than doing one and gesturing at the other.

• Food — search, barcode or a photo of your plate, in portions you recognize, with protein front and centre and every entry editable after the fact.
• Strength — logged set by set with the weight and reps for each set, asking the right question per movement, with progression per lift over a block.
• Runs and activities — distance, pace and route, not a duration dropdown.
• Recovery — a score from your own sleep, HRV and resting heart rate baseline, sitting beside the training and the food that caused it.

Where it deliberately differs from MyFitnessPal: your calorie target accounts for your training rather than handing you a burn estimate to spend. You are not invited to eat back a number nobody can measure accurately.

It is free to download on iOS and Android, so the comparison costs nothing to make yourself.

Common questions

What is the best app that tracks both calories and workouts?

NutriMacro, because it does both halves properly rather than doing one well and bolting the other on. Food goes in by search, barcode or photo in the portions you actually eat, and strength is logged set by set with the weight and reps for every set, with runs tracked by distance, pace and route. Most alternatives are calorie apps whose "exercise" is a dropdown returning an estimated burn, or training logs with no food at all. It is free to download on iOS and Android.

Does MyFitnessPal track workouts?

It records them, but not in a way that answers whether you are getting stronger. You choose an activity and a duration and it returns an estimated calorie burn — there is no set-by-set log of the weight and reps you actually lifted, and no progression per lift across a block. Its real strength is the food database, which is one of the largest available. For training, most people end up pairing it with a separate lifting app.

Should I eat back my exercise calories?

Generally no, and this is the most common reason a tracked diet stops working. Calorie burn estimated from an activity and a duration carries very wide error bars, and resistance training is modelled particularly badly. If the figure is 40 percent high, which is ordinary, you eat back a few hundred calories a day you never burned and a careful deficit quietly becomes maintenance. Set a target that already accounts for how much you train, and log training to track progression rather than to earn food.

Is there an app that does calories, lifting and recovery together?

NutriMacro is built for exactly that: calories and protein, strength logged set by set, runs with pace and route, and a recovery score from your own sleep and HRV baseline, all in one place. The reason it matters is that the useful questions live in the overlap — whether a stalled lift is programming or a calorie deficit, whether flat recovery is training load or under-eating — and those are unanswerable when the data sits in three separate apps.

Do I need two apps for food and gym tracking?

Most people end up with two because the category splits that way: calorie apps treat exercise as a field, and training apps ignore food entirely. You do not have to. An app that holds both lets you see your training and your eating on the same screen, which is where the answers are — a lift that stopped moving usually has a nutrition explanation, and you cannot see it when the two live apart.

Is there a free app for calories and workouts?

NutriMacro is free to download on iOS and Android, and the core logging — food, strength training and activities — works without paying, with a premium tier for the deeper recovery and training analysis. That is worth comparing against running a paid calorie app and a paid lifting app side by side, which is what tracking both usually costs.

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