For people who want food awareness, weekly patterns and helpful reflection — without strict calorie targets or pressure.
Hey! I'm Khawar and I head things up at SOMOS 👋🏽
If you’ve ever used MyFitnessPal or another calorie tracking app, you’ll know they can be really useful.
They can help you understand what’s in your food, spot gaps and become more aware of your habits.
There’s a reason MyFitnessPal has become one of the best-known food tracking apps, with a reported 14 million active users a month. It has a huge food database, barcode scanning, calorie and macro tracking, goal-setting features and integrations that many people find helpful.
At the same time, that kind of tracking can start to feel heavy for some users: daily targets, red warnings, streaks, endless searching, and the feeling that one meal has somehow “ruined” the day.
That’s not the kind of relationship with food I wanted to build at SOMOS.
Food Journal by SOMOS is not trying to be a stricter, more optimised version of MyFitnessPal.
It’s designed for a different kind of user: someone who wants food awareness without turning eating into another source of pressure.
In this post, I’ll look at:
- why people look for MyFitnessPal alternatives.
- what traditional calorie tracking apps do well.
- where they can become stressful or unsustainable
- why speed matters when logging food.
- how Food Journal takes a calmer, more reflective approach.
Why people look for a MyFitnessPal alternative
People usually look for a MyFitnessPal alternative for one of two reasons.
Either the app does not quite fit how they eat, or the process of tracking starts to feel too rigid.
For some people, traditional calorie tracking works well: they want detailed numbers, daily targets, exact macro goals and a large database of foods to search from.
That can be useful, especially for people with specific training, weight management or nutrition goals.
But not everyone wants food to become that precise.
And there’s another issue worth naming: food tracking is often less precise than it looks.
Large calorie tracking apps rely heavily on food databases, packaged food labels, restaurant data and user-submitted entries.
That can create surprisingly wide ranges for the same food.
One person’s “chicken curry and rice” might be 500 calories. Another entry might say 900. A homemade version, restaurant version and takeaway version might all be different again.
Even packaged food is not perfectly exact. Food labelling rules vary by country, and nutrition labels are usually allowed some margin of error. Menu calories, recipe estimates and whole foods can vary even more.
This does not make calorie data useless. It just means it should be treated with humility.
For many people, calorie and macro estimates are most useful as rough signals over time — not exact numbers to obey meal by meal.
WHOOP has a useful article on this that makes a similar point: calorie estimates can help, but they are more useful when you focus on trends rather than chasing perfect precision.
In the article, WHOOP notes that calorie intake and expenditure estimates are imprecise, that food labels can be permitted to vary by up to 20% in US and that calorie estimates are still most useful when treated as signals for trends rather than exact numbers.
That is one reason Food Journal by SOMOS is designed differently.
The goal is not to ask:
Was this meal exactly 617 calories?
The more useful question is often:
What am I noticing over time?
Food Journal still uses calorie and macro estimates where helpful, but it treats them as part of a wider picture.
You can also track hunger, fullness, meal feel, enjoyment, daily context and weekly patterns.
That matters because many people are not trying to become perfect trackers.
They are trying to understand things like:
- Am I eating enough on busy or training-heavy days?
- Which meals keep me satisfied?
- Do rushed meals affect how I feel later?
- Are my weekends very different from my weekdays?
- What is my rough baseline over time?
That is the group Food Journal by SOMOS is really built for.
People who want food awareness but don't want eating to become another daily test.
What MyFitnessPal does well
It is worth being fair here. MyFitnessPal has been a market leader for good reasons. For many people (me included!) it is their first real experience of food tracking.
It gives structure. It helps people understand what is in their meals. It can make calories, protein, fibre and portion sizes more visible. It also offers a large food database, barcode scanning, food history, goal-based tracking, health app integrations and a format many people already understand.
A lot of people don't start using MyFitnessPal because they want to be obsessive, they start because they want more awareness, more structure, or support with a specific goal.
The issue is that for some people, that structure can become too rigid over time. The daily numbers become the main event. A meal can start to feel “good” or “bad” depending on how it fits the target. If the numbers themselves are estimates, it can feel like a lot of emotional weight is being placed on data that was never perfectly exact in the first place.
That is where Food Journal takes a different approach. It still helps people understand their food, but the structure comes from reflection, context and weekly patterns — not only daily targets.
Where traditional tracking can become too much
The same features that make calorie tracking useful can also make it feel intense.
When every meal is measured against a daily target, food can start to feel like something you are constantly managing. Meals become numbers, days become pass/fail exercises, and snacks can become something to “make up for”.
For some people, that structure is motivating. For others, it adds pressure — especially when life does not fit into perfectly repeatable days.
You may train some days and rest on others. You may eat differently when travelling. You may have social meals, cultural foods, stressful deadlines, low-energy days or busy periods where convenience matters.
A food journal should help you understand that context, not flatten it into a single daily score.
That is one reason Food Journal is designed around patterns, reflection and context rather than strict daily compliance.
Why speed of logging matters
One thing I’ve learned while building Food Journal is that the best tracking method is usually the one people can actually keep using.
That sounds obvious, but it matters.
If logging a meal takes too long, most people will eventually stop. Not because they do not care, but because real life gets in the way.
You might be working late, travelling, eating out, training, caring for someone, rushing between meetings, or simply too tired to search through a long database.
That is why speed has become such an important part of how Food Journal works.
I’ve spent time building features that make logging easier in real life, including:
- importing recent meals
- repeating regular meals
- quick manual entries
- conversational logging with our nutrition assistant, FJ
- optional deeper analysis when you want more detail
If you have the same breakfast most days, you should not have to rebuild it from scratch every time.
If you want to describe a meal naturally, you should be able to type something like:
“Greek yoghurt, blueberries, oats, chia seeds and whey protein.”
Then FJ can help turn that into a useful estimate.
The point is not to make food tracking more complicated, it's to make logging quick enough that you can stay consistent without feeling like you are doing admin every time you eat.
The real value usually comes from what you notice over time, not from logging one meal perfectly.
A different kind of food journal
Food Journal by SOMOS is built to help people understand what actually supports them.
That's why we include more than calories and macros. You can also reflect on:
- hunger before eating
- fullness after eating
- fullness 30 minutes later
- how much you enjoyed the meal
- how the meal felt: rushed, social, mindful, nourishing, indulgent, habitual or cultural etc
- daily context like activity, stress or recovery
- weekly patterns over time
The aim is to help you notice what is happening with more curiosity.
What kept you full? What gave you energy? What felt rushed? What meals did you actually enjoy? What patterns keep showing up?
It’s still early days, but the first 2,000+ meals logged in Food Journal are already showing why this wider view matters:
💪 Protein patterns: users are averaging around 30g of protein per main meal, with snacks and supplements adding roughly 15g more
💖 Enjoyment matters: 73% of logged meal enjoyment entries were marked “loved it”, and early review responses show many users are finishing the day feeling comfortably fuelled.
🏋️ Context helps: strength training is the most popular logged activity, and creatine is currently the most logged supplement
That’s the kind of insight we’re interested in: not whether every meal was “perfect”, but whether people are building patterns that feel satisfying, realistic and sustainable.
Who Food Journal is for
Food Journal may be a good fit if you want food tracking to feel calmer, faster and more flexible.
It's especially useful if you:
- want to understand your food habits without obsessing over every number
- care about energy, consistency, training, recovery or general wellbeing
- want to reflect on weekly patterns rather than judge individual meals
- dislike rigid calorie tracking apps
- want a quicker way to log meals
- eat a mix of home-cooked meals, social meals, takeaways or repeated routines
- are trying to build habits that actually fit your life
It may not be the best fit if you want barcode-based food tracking, strict calorie targets, exact macro compliance or a traditional diet app experience.
That is intentional. Food Journal is not trying to replace every nutrition app for every person. It is designed for people who still want insight into their food habits, but want that insight to feel less rigid and easier to sustain.
A calmer way to start
If you are looking for a MyFitnessPal alternative because traditional calorie tracking feels too rigid, Food Journal by SOMOS may be worth trying.
You can log meals quickly, notice hunger and fullness signals, reflect on how meals actually felt, and review your week without chasing perfection.
It is not about restriction, guilt or turning food into another thing to optimise endlessly. It is about awareness — and sometimes, that is the more useful place to start.
Let’s connect… 🤝
- Subscribe to my newsletter, Build With... 🌱 to keep an eye on what we’re building.
- Reach out on LinkedIn! I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for stopping by!
Khawar | Founder & CEO @ SOMOS 👋🏽
p.s. check out our Impact Fund and some awesome Projects We Love.
