Lose It review, free logging, Premium and the daily budget

A calorie diary from FitNow

Lose It! describes itself as a calorie counter, nutrition tracker and intermittent fasting tool. The company says it started in 2008 and joined Everyday Health Group in 2022. Everyday Health Group is a division of Ziff Davis.

The site footer names FitNow, Inc., a Ziff Davis company, and the App Store names FitNow, Inc. as seller and dates the first release to November 21, 2008. The Apple listing includes iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. There is also an Android listing, and Lose It! documents food logging through both the app and loseit.com.

Search is free, the scanning tools are not

Scan It, Snap It and Say It are available only in English.

No typed-description AI logging was found on the pages checked. The App Store meal-description example uses spoken AI Voice.

The budget begins with a burn estimate

Lose It! uses basal metabolic rate, activity level and a weekly goal to set the budget. Its calculation article says BMR comes from weight, height, age and sex, without naming a BMR formula. It multiplies BMR by one of four activity levels, Not Active, Somewhat Active, Highly Active or Extremely Active.

The same article describes four weekly rates. Its half-pound setting subtracts 250 calories a day, the one-pound setting subtracts 500, the one-and-a-half-pound setting subtracts 750, and the two-pound setting subtracts 1,000. In its worked example, an estimated daily burn of 2,500 becomes a budget of 2,000 for the one-pound setting. These describe the app's calculation, not a calorie target for the reader.

The low-budget warning appears when the daily average falls below the minimums Lose It! cites, 1,500 calories for men and 1,200 for women. This is a warning rather than a hard limit. Its settings offer Safe Minimum, Low Minimum or No Minimum. Lose It! says the budget adjusts as recorded weight changes. The Calorie Schedule feature requires Premium.

Logged exercise adds calorie burn to the budget unless it is excluded. Manual exercise needs that exclusion switched on manually. With tracker data, a Calorie Bonus appears when total burn exceeds the app’s estimated Target Burn. Apple Watch sync is free, while Fitbit and Garmin need Premium.

Synced workouts appear crossed out for exercise credit because their calories are already included in total burn. That is how Lose It! avoids counting the same workout twice. Its help center leaves whether to eat back exercise calories to the user.

What remains in Basic and what the upgrade adds

• Basic includes the daily calorie budget and access to a database described as 50M+ foods. The free feature list includes calorie tracking, a plan and community support, and Apple Watch syncing does not require Premium.
• Premium includes water, sleep and nutrient targets, tracker syncing, future meal logging, barcode scans, photos and voice. The store also lists advanced tracking, intermittent fasting, meal planning and targets, diet plans and fitness app syncing.
• The feature help pages separately mark water tracking, notes and Nutrition Strategies as Premium. Nutrition Strategies is app only. The website also marks Patterns and Celebrations as Premium.

The free app has ads. Lose It! sells ad removal as a separate one-time purchase, without a stated price. That removes full-page interstitial and log banner ads, but leaves Premium prompts, dismissible affiliate promotions and affiliate cards. Dashboard affiliate cards can be hidden but not permanently disabled, and Discover affiliate cards remain visible, including for Premium members.

The help center gives a yearly price, stores list more offers

These US dollar prices come from the membership tiers article checked October 6, 2026.

Lifetime purchases are not refundable, and buying Lifetime does not cancel an active App Store or Google Play subscription. Lose It! says promotions and how often the app is used can affect prices. Most users receive discounted offers, with varying timing.

The App Store in-app purchase list runs from $9.99 to $79.99. It includes items named Premium Lifetime at $59.99 and $49.99. No billing period appears beside those purchase items, and the store does not say what those Lifetime offers are. Those entries do not replace the help-center prices above. Google Play lists $2.49 to $299.99 per item. No monthly Premium price was stated on any page checked.

The Premium help article offers a 7-day free trial to new users who have not tried Premium. Another article says Apple and Google Play can charge within 24 hours of the scheduled trial end, so cancellation less than 24 hours before the end can still result in a charge. The App Store description says yearly subscriptions renew unless auto-renew is turned off at least 24 hours before the period ends.

Store-bought Premium applies to the platform where it was purchased and to loseit.com. An Apple purchase does not grant the same benefits on Android, or a Google Play purchase on iOS.

A green check identifies a team-verified food

Lose It! says its database combines USDA foods with member uploads. Its team reviews popular uploaded foods and adds verified entries. Member contributions expand the collection, but Lose It! acknowledges that unverified entries can contain errors.

The green check mark identifies a food verified by the Lose It! team, and search can be filtered to verified foods. Its logging instructions describe those entries as more likely to contain all the nutrition information. That distinction is useful when similar search results contain different amounts of detail.

Barcode nutrition also comes from members. A person can enter the numbers incorrectly, or a brand can change its label. Lose It! lets users edit incorrect nutrition while logging. A successful barcode match therefore does not establish that the current label and saved numbers agree.

Research separates database values from full-day records

Lin compared individual foods with a research database

The 2022 study by Lin and colleagues compared four app databases with NDSR, using the 50 most frequently consumed foods from a 2017 Chicago study. Lose It! had mostly excellent agreement with NDSR for the nutrients investigated. The reported good-to-excellent agreement range for Lose It! and MyFitnessPal was 0.89 to 1.00, apart from the separate MyFitnessPal fiber exception.

An investigator selected entries, and the foods were mostly unprocessed or minimally processed. This tested database values, not everyday user entry, photo recognition or voice logging.

Griffiths compared totals from dietary recalls

The 2018 Griffiths study entered 30 daily dietary recalls from 30 lower-income adults into five free apps and compared nutrient totals with NDSR. Lose It! gave significantly lower totals for protein, fat, sodium, sugars, cholesterol and saturated fat.

A researcher entered the foods, so consumer entry was not tested. The sample was small and the findings concern app versions from around 2018.

Fallaize used weighed records and a UK reference

The 2019 Fallaize study compared five apps with Dietplan6 using 20 weighed food records, each covering 24 hours. Lose It! gave significantly lower carbohydrate, fat, fiber and sodium estimates and was the least comparable app in that study. Differences in energy and saturated fat estimates between the reference and the diet apps were not significant.

This was a small set of single-day records using UK app versions and a UK reference. It may not describe the US database.

Wharton measured how consistently people recorded food

The 2014 Wharton trial followed 47 people for 8 weeks. The app group had 19 participants, the smartphone memo group 13 and the paper group 15. Lose It! users recorded food more consistently than the paper group, but not more consistently than the memo group. The abstract reports no difference in weight change between groups.

This small, short trial used the 2014 app and did not test nutrition accuracy.

The accuracy findings conflict. Lin tested individual database entries, while Griffiths and Fallaize tested full-day totals, with Fallaize using the UK app. Different foods, references and versions make these results hard to combine into a single accuracy judgment.

The US store listings on October 6, 2026

The Google Play listing also shows 10M+ downloads. These are store figures checked on October 6, 2026, not a score assigned by TrueCal.

The parts we find useful

• Free search and a calorie budget make Basic a practical starting point for someone content to find foods by name.
• Verified-food marks and the verified-only filter give a clear way to narrow search results to entries the team has checked.
• The published budget calculation and worked example explain how the displayed number is reached.
• Free Apple Watch syncing and explicit handling of synced workouts make the exercise rules easier to follow without counting a workout twice.
• Web food entry offers a computer option alongside the phone diary.
• The mostly excellent database agreement in Lin’s study supports confidence in the particular foods tested, with the study limits kept in view.

The costs and limits we would weigh

• Moving barcode scans into Premium means a familiar logging method may stop being free on an existing account.
• Photos and voice require Premium, and Scan It, Snap It and Say It only work in English. Paying does not remove that language restriction.
• Ad removal is a separate purchase, and affiliate cards remain after payment. Paid access does not mean a screen without promotions.
• Variable offers and store purchase prices without billing periods complicate price comparisons. None of the checked pages supplied a monthly price.
• Member-entered barcode nutrition can be wrong or outdated. The lookup still needs a check against the package.
• Griffiths and Fallaize found underestimates for several nutrients. Those older, limited findings keep us from treating a large database as proof that every total is accurate.
• Support for iOS 17 ended with version 18.2.400, and the App Store requires iOS 18.0 or later.
• Premium bought through a store does not carry across phone platforms. That restriction matters when moving between iOS and Android.

Match the plan to the way you keep a diary

Basic fits a routine built around searching for foods and comparing entries with a calorie budget. Premium is easier to justify when scans, photos, voice, custom nutrient targets or future meals are tools a person expects to use regularly. We would weigh those specific uses against the published yearly price.

For the direct rivals, read Lose It! compared with MyFitnessPal or Cronometer and Lose It! for nutrient detail. The TrueCal and Lose It! comparison covers another logging option. Our guide to trackers that show nutrition sources focuses on tracing numbers.

For a different free-first tracker, see the MyNetDiary review. For targets that adapt from weigh-ins, see the MacroFactor review.

TrueCal is another option. Manual logging and calorie access are free, while macros and logging through typed descriptions, voice, photos or barcodes require Pro. Pro costs $29.99 a year or $9.99 a month. Eligible customers can try it free for 14 days in the iPhone or Android app, with the App Store or Google Play running the trial. Its nutrition estimates can be wrong.

Answers about free access and subscriptions