Calorie Counter by fatsecret 9.3 for Android

Calorie Counter by FatSecret is a food diary where you can record what you eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. The app calculates a daily calorie goal for you, helping build healthier habits one day at a time. FatSecret is free to use and has no annoying ads.

Features and Tools

When you first open the app, you need to set up some basics (age, weight, goals) to get a daily calorie plan. The home screen greets you with a community feed of other users’ posts, where people post progress updates, meal photos, and encouragement. Adding foods is also easy: you can search a huge database (they claim it’s the world’s largest) for almost any food or brand. If you struggle to find a food item by name, and for packaged items, there’s the barcode scanner — you just point your phone at a cereal box or yogurt and boom, the calories and nutrients pop up. FatSecret even includes an image recognition feature that tries to identify foods from a photo.

FatSecret’s photo-based food logging lets you snap a picture of a meal to identify it (a fun idea, though it doesn’t always get it right). I tested this feature out of curiosity by photographing a mixed salad I made. The app did recognize a couple of ingredients (it correctly picked up “lettuce” and “chicken” from the image) but missed others, so I still had to manually search for items like dressing. It’s a cool concept, but I’ve learned not to rely on it too much. Most days I stick to typing in foods or scanning barcodes, which is faster and more accurate.

Beyond the diary, FatSecret offers so many other tools, like a built-in community section, an exercise log to track calories burned, and a weight tracker that graphs your weight changes over time. There’s also a helpful nutritional breakdown — the app shows you your daily totals of calories and macros (carbs, protein, fat), and even vitamins and other nutrients if you want details. 

Free vs. Premium

One thing that is great about FatSecret is that almost everything is free. You get all the essential features without paying a cent — calorie and macro tracking, the food and exercise diaries, the barcode scanner, weight logging, and community support are included by default. Unlike some apps that hide “premium” behind paywalls, FatSecret’s basic version felt fully functional to me. In fact, there are no ads on the free version either, so it never felt like the app was trying to annoy me into upgrading. That said, FatSecret does offer a Premium subscription with extra tools for a monthly fee (around $6.49/month). It shows a banner about meal plans — these are dietitian-created weekly meal plans for various diets (like Keto, Mediterranean, high-protein, etc.) which are only for Premium users. Premium also adds a few advanced tools like the ability to plan meals ahead of time and a water intake tracker, plus some customization options such as additional meal slots.

Logging meals and Keeping Motivated

Tracking your weight in FatSecret provides a simple graph of progress over time. This visual feedback is designed to keep you motivated on tougher days. Each time you log your weight, you can switch to the Weight tab and see a line graph trending downward (or upward during muscle gain phases). It’s pretty encouraging to watch that line move in the right direction, even if it’s slow. 

Logging meals will quickly become a habit; the app remembers your “recent” and “frequently eaten” foods, so after a week it will take you only a minute to add common items: your morning coffee or usual lunch sandwich. You can also use the Saved Meals feature to add items at once on days you eat the same thing. Little conveniences like that make FatSecret feel tailored to real life. 

Final Thoughts

After several weeks of using Calorie Counter by FatSecret, I can say it has greatly affected my daily routine. I think this app is perfect for everyday people who want a simple, supportive way to track food and reach a weight goal. It’s especially great if you value a strong feature set for free — you get community support, calorie and macro tracking, and even integration with fitness devices without paying anything.