Privacy-conscious nutrition/activity trackers: do they exist?

July 26, 2018 3:43 PM

I am searching for tools to assist in tracking nutrition info and physical activity. The popular options today all appear to require signing up for accounts, mostly linking via facebook. I want something that will track this information locally, rather than shipping all my precious bodily fluids information to The Cloud.

I am looking to get back into tracking my diet and activity. Several years back (around 2008-2010) I had a system I used to get myself into shape, following a stint in grad school and a transition to the workforce and "adult" life that had me lapsing into unhealthy eating habits and largely immobile activity levels. A combination of the "Hacker Diet" excel spreadsheet, the "Lose It!" iOS app, and an informal group of coworkers that used materials from the American Heart Association to encourage daily and weekly fitness goals got me into the best shape of my life. I would like to reproduce that level of fitness, following a messy co-dependent relationship and subsequent breakup that had me lapsing into unhealthy eating habits and non-existent activity levels.

Things that worked well for me in the past:

1. An easily searchable nutrition database, to find and log the stuff I am eating;
2. Ability to store common meals for quick logging of repeat items;
3. A graph of weight tracking a moving average;
4. Calculation of estimated baseline metabolism, and estimated caloric surplus/deficit over time;

Things that don't really do it for me:

1. App-mediated connections with people or groups; I'll do that face-to-face, thanks; I do not have/want facebook, etc;
2. Dictating or promoting meals; I do fine getting my own food, I just want to do a better job of keeping track of eaten foods;

Going back to look at "Lose It!" today, the accounts that were introduced as an optional feature back when I used the app, now appear to be mandatory. And, every similar category of app looks to have the same requirements for an account. All of this is stuff that I could do with a pocket notebook, Excel/Numbers, and some scheduled times to do data entry from log and database to spreadsheets. But I would like An App For That. Preferably one that is not based on Hoovering up tons of personal data, even post-GDPR. If it must have accounts, an Overcast-style anonymous account would be best.

So: is this the new normal? Are there any paid apps or combination of apps that will help me track this information without also sharing it with Big Brother and any random script kiddie that finds the app's unencrypted MongoDB "customer" database in a public S3 bucket next month? Does anyone have their own home-grown solution?

posted by jraenar to Health & Fitness (3 answers total)

The registered dietician my doctor referred me to recommended eaTracker (it's free) from Dieticians of Canada (the professional association for RDs here).

You can check out the privacy policy and terms of use to see if it's a deal-breaker based on some of your criteria - it's still storing stuff on the cloud, but the app itself is from a non-shady/non-rapacious organization. AFAIK, I don't think there's anything stopping you from using it from another country.

Having used it, I can say it does a good job of:

1. An easily searchable nutrition database, to find and log the stuff I am eating;

2. Ability to store common meals for quick logging of repeat items;

It's also good for "I just want to do a better job of keeping track of eaten foods," by referencing the nutritional data of what you log and giving you a dashboard of calories etc. consumed within a given day.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:12 PM on July 26, 2018

Found in the Free Software Directory, I have no experience with any of these:
SportsTracker
NUT
Gnutrition
posted by Bangaioh at 2:17 AM on July 27, 2018

I may have just snuck in before they started requiring accounts, but I have a version of Lose It! on my phone that doesn't require an account but will keep your history (I assume locally but haven't looked into the privacy settings carefully). It does try to upsell me into a free account every couple of days and then tries to get me into a paid account about once a week, but it's not any more obnoxious than any other free app.
posted by snaw at 8:08 AM on July 27, 2018