Home › Blog › Vegetarian tracking
Guide
Calories are the easy part of vegetarian tracking and the part every app handles. The questions that actually decide whether the diet works are protein, B12 and iron — and most apps will let you miss all three without a word.
An Indian vegetarian diet is usually fine on calories and short on protein. The three things worth watching are protein (1.6–2.0 g/kg, which takes planning), B12 (not reliably present without dairy or a supplement) and iron. An app needs katori portions, fast repeat logging, and ideally your lifts alongside. For that, Nutri Macro is the best option.
An Indian vegetarian diet is rarely difficult to keep in a calorie range. Rice, roti, dal and sabzi are filling and the portions are visible. If your only goal is a deficit, almost any tracker will do the job.
The diet fails, when it fails, on composition rather than quantity.
Hitting 1.6–2.0 g/kg without meat, fish or eggs is possible and it is not accidental. Practically it means anchoring two meals a day on a deliberate source:
Without deliberate anchoring, a full and satisfying vegetarian day lands around 50–70 g, which is roughly half of what someone training needs.
B12 is not reliably available from a vegetarian Indian diet without dairy, and even with dairy it is often marginal. It is worth knowing rather than assuming, and it is worth raising with a doctor rather than solving from a blog.
Iron from plant sources absorbs less readily than from meat. Vitamin C alongside the meal helps — lemon on the dal is a genuinely useful habit rather than folklore.
Cronometer has the deepest micronutrient data by a distance — more than eighty nutrients from lab-verified sources — and if B12 and iron numbers are your specific reason for tracking, that is a real strength. Its weakness is Indian food: home-cooked dishes generally need custom recipes built by hand, which is where most Indian users stop.
Nutri Macro takes the opposite approach: Indian portions and dishes that work out of the box, protein visible day to day, and your training log in the same place so the protein number connects to something.
Free on iPhone and Android. Katori portions, regional vegetarian dishes, protein tracked properly, and your lifting alongside it.
Anchor two meals a day on a deliberate source rather than hoping the total adds up. Paneer at roughly 18–20 g per 100 g does the most work, curd twice a day adds a reliable 10–15 g, and soya chunks are the cheapest large lever if you will eat them. Dal and rajma are the base, not the answer.
Nutri Macro is the best option for everyday use, because Indian vegetarian eating is mostly home-cooked dishes in katori portions and that is exactly what it is built for. If your specific reason for tracking is B12 or iron as clinical numbers, Cronometer’s micronutrient depth is stronger — the two answer different questions.
Quite possibly, and it is worth testing rather than guessing. B12 is not reliably available from a vegetarian Indian diet, and even with dairy it is often marginal. This is a question for a doctor rather than an app or a blog.
Yes, provided protein is deliberate. The diet is not the limitation — the default composition is. A vegetarian day that feels full and complete lands around 50–70 g of protein, which is roughly half what someone training seriously needs, and closing that gap is a planning problem rather than a food problem.
Eat vitamin C alongside the meal — lemon on the dal is the everyday version and it genuinely works. Tea and coffee with meals work against absorption, so moving them an hour either side is a small change with a real effect.
No, and trying to is a common way to make tracking exhausting enough to quit. Calories and protein drive nearly all of the result. Micronutrients matter when there is a specific reason — a diagnosed deficiency, pregnancy, or a clinician asking — and then they are worth a period of careful tracking rather than a permanent habit.
Katori portions, regional vegetarian dishes, protein tracked properly and your lifting in the same app.
NutriMacro is a nutrition and training tracker for iPhone and Android. It logs food by barcode, photo or search, counts food in slices and units rather than grams, and keeps strength training, GPS activities, sleep and recovery in the same daily view. It runs in the language of your phone across 108 countries.
Read next: Best protein tracker in India Cronometer vs Nutri Macro Best Indian food calorie tracker
