Lose It’s challenges are a key feature: choosing specific goals like a maximum carbs limit, or simply logging in regularly, and then comparing yourself to others in rankings tables.

The ability to browse menus from popular restaurant brands, from KFC to Nando’s, is also handy. Graphs on your intake, nutrients and steps are very clear, while the process for logging your meals, snacks and exercise is quick and easy too, whether you’re searching for ingredients or scanning barcodes. Like its rivals, it starts by getting you to set a goal: using your current and target weights, height, gender and desired pace of weight loss to assign a daily “budget” for your food intake. Lose It is one of the apps that puts the emphasis firmly on losing weight, as the name suggests. It removes the ads bumps you up the queue for customer support lets you dig deeper into “macronutrients” in your diet provides recipe meal plans, and enables you to fine-tune your daily goals and nutritional plans. MyFitnessPal is free with advertising, but it has a premium tier costing £7.99 a month or £39.99 a year. Adding friends via Facebook, your phone contacts or email can provide encouragement, while the app also provides access to forums to swap tips with a bustling community of strangers. You can set goals for weight, nutrition and fitness, with simple but clear graphs showing how you’re doing. The app also connects to a wide range of wearable fitness-bands and health apps too: for example, I have data feeding in to it from my Fitbit band and RunKeeper exercise-tracking app. MyFitnessPal also doubles as an exercise tracker: it’ll calculate calories burned from activities from running and rowing to abdominal crunches and even mowing the lawn. It has a huge database of more than 5m foods, with helpful green-tick symbols marking those where their nutritional information has been verified as accurate. The app makes it easy to log your meals and snacks, either by searching for them or scanning product barcodes. MyFitnessPal is the most high-profile calorie counter, with more than 80 million users by the time it was bought for $475m by sports brand Under Armour in February 2015.

Apps like myfitnesspal