Looking for the best way to track your macros for success on the keto diet? Keto Diet App is the perfect tool to help you take the guesswork out of eating keto. With a detailed macro calculator, keto meal planning, progress tracking, and a complete ketogenic diet guide. And 300 amazing keto recipes built right in. This post is in paid partnership with Keto Diet App.
So let me start of first by saying that I have been recommending Keto Diet App for ages already. In fact, I even wrote about it as a useful tool and resource in The Everyday Ketogenic Kitchen. It’s a great resource for people who want to track their macros and their progress on a keto diet. I’ve known Martina, the app’s creator, for quite some time and she’s an incredibly talented woman with a passion for helping people. So when she asked me to try out their updated version, I was happy to jump on board.
As many of you know, I consider myself “lazy keto”. I don’t track everything I eat, I just try to keep my carbs low and my fats high. As long as my blood sugar and my ketones stay within good range, I am happy. But counting your macros can be really useful in many cases. For people just starting the keto diet, it can give them a good sense of where they are and whether they are hitting the mark. When you make a huge lifestyle change and turning your diet on its head, a tool like this can really help.
I also think it’s great as a check in tool, even when you’ve been on the keto diet for a long time as I have. We all know life gets crazy and we can get a little off track. Using a tracking app like Keto Diet App is similar to keeping a food journal and it keeps you honest, so to speak. Because you have to enter everything you eat into the app, you might think twice about eating that second piece of keto cheesecake, just in case it pushes up your protein or your carbs! Mmmmm, cheesecake…
A Useful Keto Calculator
But unlike keeping a food journal, the keto diet app does all the messy calculations for you. All you have to do is enter the food and Martina has done her utmost to make that as simple as possible.
The first step, of course, is to enter all of your own information, so that the macro calculator can identify an ideal daily macro consumption profile for you. This is completely customizable to your goals, your daily activity level, and your current weight, height, and age, etc. You can also set your own net carb limits. Not sure what those should be? Click through to the guide right underneath and it will take you to a great article on how to choose this.
Then you simply scroll down and based on all of this info, Keto Diet App tells you how many calories, carbs, fat, and protein you should be eating on a daily basis. You can see that for my choice of moderately active, plus my height, my weight, my gender, my age, and my goal of maintenance, it suggests 1796 daily calories, 25g of carbs (that was my choice to put in that limit…a lot of folks choose 20g), 74g of protein and 156g of fat.
Tracking Macros
Now once you have all of your own personal info in there, you are ready to get tracking! This is the fun part. The daily planner is the best place to do this and you can use it in advance (i.e. planning out your meals and seeing how they fall into range) or ad hoc, as I did, simply entering what I ate into the planner and seeing how it all shook out.
As you enter each thing you eat or plan to eat, the tracker tells you at the top how much of each macro you have left to fit into your day. I found that part particularly useful because I could adjust as I went and tailor the next meal to match things a little better. I did tend to go over my protein limit every day but that’s not of great concern to me since I lift weights and have a lot of muscle. The activity level that you put in can’t really distinguish between cardio and weightlifting, and on days I do heavy lifting at CrossFit, I need the extra protein!
When entering the food, you have a number of different choices. If you use the Keto Diet meals themselves, you can simply enter those. I actually chose that a few times when one of Martina’s recipes from The Keto Diet Blog was similar enough to what I actually ate.
You can also use the barcode scanner to quickly enter packaged recipes. This thing is so cool! I want to run around scanning everything. I don’t know how they do it because there are so many millions of products with barcodes out there but it’s incredibly useful. I know it’s an update they made a little while ago and it is spectacular.
But I found myself using Quick Meal and Custom Meal the most. Quick Meals allowed me to just list some of the ingredients I’d used in a simple meal (such as eating bacon, eggs, and avocado for breakfast). Custom Meal allowed me to enter some of my own recipes, such as my Coconut Flour Pancakes. One thing I did to save time was simply to enter them as the nutritional info, instead of all the ingredients. That way, all the relevant macro information is there without the laborious process of writing out all the ingredients.
Tracking Your Keto Progress
Another useful tool in the Keto Diet App is the progress tracking. Any variables that you want to track are there and you enter them in the daily planner along with your meals. You can track how much water you drink, Body Stats (including weight, body fat %, waist circumference, hips, thighs, chest, upper arms), Readings (Ketones for blood, urine or breath, Blood glucose for fasting or post-prandial, and lipid profiles), Mood, Energy, etc. It’s really quite comprehensive. I didn’t use this part that much but I can see entering my ketones (I use a blood monitor) and my glucose levels to stay better on top of those.
How much does it cost?
Here’s one of the great things about Keto Diet App. There is a single one-time fee, with no subscription or recurring fees. And it’s only $8.99 for the premium version, which gives you access to all the tools I listed above. Plus 300 great keto recipes and a comprehensive keto guide. And NO ads bugging you to check it another app, thank goodness.
There are a number of copycats of Keto Diet App and a lot of them are trying to capitalize on Martina’s wonderful app and even copying the name to try to win people over. Several of them are fairly inaccurate, especially when it comes to counting carbs (some don’t know to eliminate erythritol!), and none are as comprehensive or as informative as Keto Diet App. Be sure you look for the distinctive logo with the blue fish to make sure you have the right one!
All in all? I am delighted with it. Although I won’t always be a tracker, watching everything like this, I think it’s an incredibly useful tool for many people. And I will be using mine every so often as a “check-in”, to see how I am doing or when I need to get back on track a little.
