Some years ago, I had a wonderful experience with daily food habits. I starting making meal plans and would stick to them. This helped me grow more muscle weight (and now I have the beginnings of a belly I need to get rid of).

But it’s been a few years since then and I’ve grown out of them. It’s going to be summertime soon so I decided to re-calculate my calorie intake and start having meal plans again. Healthy food and exercise time, folks.

Guess where I turned to first? The Play Store.

There are a gazillion nutrition and nutrition plan making apps on the store. The best of them – without a doubt – are paid. Like 8fit and Calorie Counter (MyFitnessPal) … these are all excellent apps with tons of features – but they’re expensive.

What I needed was something free, easy-to-use and informative.

I found some. Take a look:

Detox & Diets

• On the App Store, apps like these are usually rejected. Fortunately, that’s not the case in the Play Store.
• Detox & Diets is just a bunch of information. Lots of recipes for detox, diets and diet plans.
• You can “favorite” recipes that you want to save. They’re all stored up in a quickly-accessible place in the app. This feature is quite helpful. I’ve got a bunch of detox recipes (tea, mostly) saved up this way.
• What I found really interesting is that you can quickly add any recipe you like to your calendar. It’s not a comprehensive meal-plan but it almost gets there. (No repetitive save, unfortunately)
• The number of detoxes seemed minimal. I hope they add more.

Get Detox & Diets

MyPlate

• MyPlate is a very simple, sort of bare-bones calorie tracker. The core idea is – you track your intake and exercise and see if you hit the daily goals.
• The app has all the information about calories built-in. You just have to track your breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, exercise etc. Adding things can be a little tedious at first (because you have to find them all) but once you have added a bunch of them, it gets easier.
• Has a “Community” feature with lots of interesting questions, tips and help from a lot of people using MyPlate.

Get MyPlate

Eat This Much

• Eat This Much is by far the most popular app I’ve seen around. It has lots of fans and for good reason.
• The whole idea of Eat This Much is simple: you decide how much you want to eat per day (in calories) – called Nutrition targets – and you select your food preference (vegetarian, paleo etc). The app will generate meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner (or more if you select them).
• If you’re not happy with the meal plan, you hit “Regenerate”.
• In the free version, you can only generate plans for the current day (so you have to make sure you’re up early in order to source the materials for the day’s meal). I’d say that if you’re serious about using the app, it’s worth going premium just to schedule meal plans in advance.
• For all the meals it suggests, you can get the recipe from right within the app. It’s simple and easy.

Get Eat This Much

Lifesum

• Lifesum is similar to MyPlate in the sense of counting calories based on your inputs. But it’s the better version of the both with a nicer user interface and many more bells and whistles to go with.
• In the free version, you get just one meal plan. That’s quite enough for starters, by the way.
• There are lots of recipes to pick from – with all necessary information on carbs, cals, fat etc. However, limitations come in the form of you not being able to add them to your daily meal plans.
• But of course you can also track your diet independent of those limitations. You can note down whatever you ate and whatever you exercised and the app will give you a calorie reading.

Get Lifesum

Nutrition (Freeletics)

• What I like about Nutrition is you add a recipe you like to your shopping list and you know exactly what you have to buy.
• What you’ll probably not like about Nutrition is that the “Coach” feature is not free. Nevertheless, the recipes make up for it.
• Nutrition features a huge repository of recipes that you can pick from. They are conveniently tagged “Breakfast”, “Lunch”, “Post workout” etc (a dozen or more of these tags) so you can take your pick or filter them.

Get Nutrition (from Freeletics)