Tracknburn Review

As far as food/workout trackers go, most of the apps out there wildly miss the mark. For the most part, the apps in the App Store work on either one spectrum or another, i.e. either calorie tracking or fitness tracking. What so many people know yet often ignore, it takes a nutrition plan and a workout plan to get fit. It's one thing to drink Slim Fast all day, but a completely different beast to tackle something like P90X.

Tracknburn works by adjusting your goals to you. If you are 160 pounds and 6' tall and want to get bigger you'll need a very different plan than a 320 pound guy at the same height. For each goal though, the key is the calorie deficit: did you burn more calories than you put in?

Once you get into the app, the home page is divided into four sections, "Track," "Burn," "Weight," and "Water Consumption." The two sections that make or break the app though are definitely the tracking and burning sections, hence the name of the app.

The food tracking section within Tracknburn is simplistic, but does wonders compared to most other apps of its kind. What I'm used to in calorie tracking apps are two things, restaurant foods and grocery store foods. The problem is that the restaurant foods are all chain restaurants and the groceries are all from giant corporate grocery store chains. By no means is Trader Joe's small, but it's amazing how many apps don't have their most popular food, their mandarin orange chicken (or any of their food for that matter), in the database. Well fear not folks, Tracknburn has it. I still have to do the measurement in cups (why can't it just do it in servings?), but that's neither here nor there. Most importantly, if you are eating something that isn't in the system, you can either invent the meal within the app and have the app figure out its nutrition facts or you can just name the meal yourself and manually enter the facts in.

The burn part of the app isn't quite as impressive to me as the track feature, but it's more than adequate. In the burn home screen, you can choose whether you did strength training, aerobic training, sports, or a custom workout. Except for the custom workout, there are a list of very basic exercises to click on which have preset calorie burns built in. More often than not I'll just enter in a custom workout and then say how many calories I burned, which is usually just a guess, but I suppose that system is better than cycling through a list of every workout known to man.

In the end, calorie/workout tracking is a real pain in the butt, but for many it is a necessary evil. It's amazing how much food people will put down each day without realizing the harm they are doing to their bodies, and it's only once people start counting that they will get better. One final word of note though; tracking your calories and workouts every day on a mobile device is a bit of a pain. In my opinion, the only viable way to get people to stick with a tracking program is to combine the iOS app with a web app. If I were Healthy U Technologies, I would definitely think about making an app for the Mac App Store.