Nutrition education comes hand-in-hand with personal training services, especially when you work online with clients. For most body composition goals, the food they eat will have a crucial role, and it's only natural that you help them navigate it in the right direction.
Members of PT Distinction have nutrition coaching covered for the vast majority of clients with videos, nutritionist made coaching documents, habit tracking, photo food diary, adherence charts, My Fitness Pal integration and example meal plans. However, some trainers may wish to move outside their normal scope of practice and provide dietitian level detail for physically elite clients wishing to dial in nutrition to the tightest degree. For these trainers a range of software is available on the market. In this article, we'll list 11 of the best nutrition apps available, each is slightly different in their focus so read through to find the best option for you.
Nutrium provides fantastic support for dietitians, nutrition coaches, online personal trainers, and clients who need nutrition support. The features available include nutritional assessment, diet evaluation, meal planning, recipes, food groups, online appointment bookings and more.
You can also integrate it with the video software you use for coaching calls or live sessions, including Yoom, Google Meet or Skype. On top of all that, your clients will have access to everything via a smartphone app so they can take their plans with them anywhere. You can use the goal-setting feature to coach clients around eating habits, ensuring they get everything they need.
The pricing starts at €30 per month for up to 10 clients. You can try it for FREE for 14 days to decide whether it suits your needs.
Nutritionists going through their courses will already know this software as they get access to it while they're learning. It's a pretty powerful tool to have in your kit as an online personal trainer as well. Nutritics features go beyond most nutrition software in the support you can provide to your client's nutrition plan. As a start, there are over 800,000 foods in the database, including some supplements, setting this software apart.
Nutritics provides a highly customisable solution and allows you to support your customers, no matter their needs. First of all, there are several editions of the software available based on business needs.
The Health Edition provides access to Diet Analysis, Meal Planning, Recipe Analysis and the Mobile App. The Sport Edition includes Activity tracking on top of the meal planning features. The mobile app 'LIBRO' integrates habit tracking and goal and task management, and content delivery.
The Sport Edition is probably the best suited for personal trainers unless you already use an online training app, like PT Distinction to properly design and track client workouts. The price starts from £14 per month when billed annually, and you can store up to 5 clients and analyse up to 25 recipes with that. If you want to create meal plans, you'll need the Plus plan, which starts at £25 per month. You can book a demo with the team, and they also offer a free trial.
My Fitness Pal is one of the most popular apps for food tracking and has a massive database of meals, foods and ingredients. The users can also add food items to the database. So clients are best to double-check that the macro info is accurate. One of the benefits is that they can add foods with a barcode and then log them.
My Fitness Pal is available as both a mobile app and a web account from a desktop. Default access is free. However, if your client wants to customise their macronutrient goals and access premium features, they will need to subscribe to Premium, of which the annual fee is $49.99, or they can pay $9.99 monthly.
There are a couple of ways you can integrate My Fitness Pal into your online coaching practice. You either choose an online personal training software like PT Distinction that integrates with My Fitness Pal, or you ask your clients to make their diary available for you to view from your account and help them that way.
DietMaster is a big name in the nutrition world. With over a million users worldwide, it is a highly valued piece of software in the industry. DietMaster has different solutions based on the type of nutrition coaching their consultants provide.
Pro is a purely desktop-based software that provides analysis tools and meal plans to the users, and they can print the report and give out meal plan templates in hard copy to clients.
DietMaster Web is their answer to the fast-growing need for online solutions, and it's available to the platform that best suits you. Online personal trainers can choose to have clients log their meals, provide them with meal plans designed by Registered Dietitians that can be tailored.
In terms of pricing, DietMaster Pro costs $499, and you'll have to make your purchase based on what operating system your computer has. It's separate for Windows and Mac. The online solution starts at $29.95 per month with a $59 activation fee, but if you'd like to have access to the meal plan templates, you'll need to sign up for the medium plan for $65.95 per month with a $199 activation fee.
Nutrition Maker is a cloud-based software designed to help dietitians, nutrition coaches, and online fitness coaches support their clients with nutrition analysis and meal planning services. It comes with the free Nutrition Now app to access user accounts easily from their smartphone. It also has a Zoom integration so you can launch video coaching calls with your clients.
Other features expected from nutrition software include calorie assessment, extensive food database, healthy recipes, goal and progress tracking, diet analysis and many more. The app gives you access to over 1400 dietitian-designed meal plan templates from various categories, including gluten-free, low carb, low sodium, Asian, Italian and Mexican cuisine, vegetarian and vegan food, and many more.
You can try it free for 2 weeks, and the price of the Start-Up plan is also pretty reasonable at $15 per month for handling 5 clients.
tiqdiet.com
Professional and easy to use, this piece of software can be beneficial to personal trainers and clients alike. One of the great things about it is that it comes with 'intelligent reminders' that are essentially there to motivate clients into doing what they should be doing. You can use TiqDiet on both mobile and desktop.
Valuable features for personal trainers include nutrition planning, built-in chat with clients, grocery shopping lists and recipes and progress tracking. In terms of pricing, they kept it super simple, at $24 per month on the annual plan OR $29 on the monthly plan. You access all the features and can add an unlimited number of clients and diet plans for that price. It's certainly worth a look for freelance in-person and online personal trainers alike, at least for a free trial.
Lifesum is a health app designed for people who want to focus on the calories and macronutrients in their food and who want to become healthier and fitter through gradual progress in making their diet more nutritious. There isn't a coaching version of this app, so if you like the way it's set out, you can encourage your clients to sign up, and you'd help them through the process and keep them accountable. You might even want to try it out yourself to see how it can help them.
With Lifesum, your clients can track their food intake, access pre-made meal plans that follow specific dietary needs or goals or follow a particular diet like keto, high protein, Mediterranean or even intermittent fasting and delicious recipes.
The app integrates with Apple Health, Google Fit, Samsung Health, Apple Watch, Runkeeper, Fitbit, Withings, Samsung wearables, Wear OS and Google Assistant.
As far as pricing goes, they kept the structure simple. For the monthly fee, users can access all the features. Depending on the commitment level, users pay between £3.33 and £9.99 per month.
Cronometer is a nutrition app designed by a group of Canadian professionals who care a great deal about nutrition, the outdoors and being active in general. Cronometer provides the whole package because clients can use the free app. At the same time, nutritionists, health professionals and personal trainers can sign up for Cronometer Pro to access sophisticated data and insightful reports on client's diaries.
Cronometer comes with staple features like a food diary, macro and micronutrient tracking, custom diet setting, timer for those who want to try intermittent fasting, diet support for keto, vegans or even if your doc recommends a specific diet. Cronometer integrates with Apple Fit, Samsung Health, Google Fit and several activity trackers, including Fitbit, Strava or Garmin and many more.
Cronometer pro is an excellent choice if you provide comprehensive nutrition support for your online personal training clients. It gives you a platform to quickly set up and manage clients, share foods and recipes and track their progress. You can also monitor trends and support clients when they need to. Your clients will get access to the premium Gold version of Cronometer and priority support from the customer service team if they have any issues.
The Cronometer app with its default features is available for free for individuals. The premium Gold subscription costs $3.33 per month. It becomes ad-free, provides customisation options for the diary, adds the fasting timer, a biometrics tracker, recipe share options and custom reports and charts. Cronometer Pro offers a 30-day free trial for health professionals and coaches, so you have plenty of time to determine if it suits your needs. The Pro subscription is $24.95 per month, covering up to 10 clients. Additional clients cost $2 per client per month. The Pro Plus plan is ideal for bigger businesses at $94.95 per month for up to 25 clients.
ColourFit by heroPro sport is a comprehensive solution for athletes and sports teams to manage their nutrition. The team behind the software is nothing short of world-class nutritionists and fitness experts with tremendous experience in how to help their clients optimise performance and nutrition.
This app is ideal for professional coaches and athletes who need science-backed nutrition plans and tools to help them optimise their nutrition for performance. There are three levels at which you can employ this app: basic, advanced and elite. Available features of the ColourFit system will depend on which plan you choose, but they include a meal library, food database, meal plans, meal builders, shopping lists, head coach and even on-site services.
You can book a commitment-free consultation with the team to learn which plan might be best for you and figure out how the app and the team can help you. Their client base includes football clubs and pro athletes, so if your goal is to train that type of clientele as an online coach, this app might be the best choice for you.
My Plate Calorie Tracker is a free mobile app developed by Livestrong. You can find goal tracking, meal planning, shopping lists, nutrition charts and a whole range of other features on this app. It primarily focuses on nutrition, even though Livestrong did add some short workouts just as a bonus.
Personal trainers can use My Plate to provide suggestions to their clients to keep them on the right track. Whatever device your clients have, they'll be able to download the app, whether iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch or an Android Device. As the name suggests, it's ideal for trainers and clients who focus on calorie counting as part of their nutrition planning.
Healthie is not just about meal planning. The software goes beyond that. While nutrition is a massive part of its features, it also provides a comprehensive system for various professionals, including health centres, therapists and personal trainers.
So let's see a few of the main tasks you can organise in Healthie: client management portal, electronic intake forms, scheduling, video consults and webinars, billing and payments, insurance billing and mobile app.
Healthie provides a platform where you can scale a nutrition plan or wellness program and sort out business admin at the same time. It is suitable for mid to sizeable online fitness businesses who want to have everything in one place.
You'll see this reflected in their pricing structure as well. You can try it for free and keep using a free account with up to 10 clients and basic features available. Their next plan starts at $49 per month for 250 clients and a few added features like group messaging. If you'd like to access API integrations, you'll have to go up to the Enterprise plan.
The list above provides a range of options for online personal trainers to help their clients with their nutrition goals. Those trainers who are happy to outsource meal planning are better off choosing software that comes with meal plans, but if you aim to support your clients without giving them specific diet plans or if you're qualified to create them yourself, the free or low-priced options will work nicely.
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