The 4 Best Delicious Cooking Apps for Dieters

Finding healthy recipes can be a chore, especially if you're on a diet and counting calories. There are several healthy recipe apps for smartphones, and a few offer unique features that help dieters shed weight. If you're looking for a healthy recipes app, the ones in this list provide nutritional information, as well as specific content for low-carb and low-fat diets.

01

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Allrecipes Dinner Spinner

What We Like

Lots of different recipes.
Shopping-list feature.

What We Don't Like

Lots of ads.
Must sign in or create an account to access some useful search features.

The free AllRecipes Dinner Spinner app is a fun way to discover new recipe ideas. Choose a course and main ingredient (and shake your iPhone if that's your platform), and the app displays recipes that meet your criteria.

With thousands of user-submitted recipes to choose from, you're bound to find something new. AllRecipes is one of the best apps for low-carb dieters, as it has filters for high-fiber, low-fat, gluten-free, and low-sodium diets. The app includes nutritional information for all recipes, including total carbs and dietary fiber so that you can calculate your net carb intake.

Download For:

iOS

Android

02

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HealthyRecipes

The SparkRecipes app for iPad open to the Dietary Needs search screen.

What We Like

Nutrition facts are clearly displayed on the recipe page.
Clean design, well-organized, and ad-free.

What We Don't Like

Not clear who computes the nutrition facts when the recipes are user-contributed.
No extra tools like shopping lists.

The HealthyRecipes app is from the same folks behind SparkPeople.com, a popular diet and calorie-tracking website. As a result, SparkRecipes is similarly focused on helping dieters shed pounds.

SparkRecipes includes nearly 200,000 user-submitted recipes, each one with detailed nutritional information. Unlike some diet apps, which give only a brief overview, SparkRecipes is more detailed and includes information on polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat, potassium, fiber, and sugar. You can also search for specific low-fat or low-carb recipes.

Download For:

iOS

Android

03

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Plan to Eat

What We Like

Meal-planner design.
Integrated shopping list.
Recipe import from the web.

What We Don't Like

Paid app. Offers a 30-day free trial, then its nearly $40 a year.
No built-in recipe list. You add the recipes yourself.

This app is a bit different. It's not a recipe-discovery tool. Instead, it's a comprehensive meal-planning solution. Also available on the web, you can use it to schedule complex meals days or weeks in advance, generate the shopping lists you need to prepare meals more effectively, and more.

Although you can add a new recipe by hand, the app offers an import feature that works well. We tried it with AllRecpies and all the metadata, including the meal image and the nutrition data, imported cleanly. Specify the URL in the app, and it fetches the recipe.

Plan to Eat requires an annual subscription, although you can use it for free for 30 days.

Download For:

iOS

Android

04

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Yummly

What We Like

A library of more than 2 million recipes.
Tell the app what your diet and allergy needs are, and it filters for you.

What We Don't Like

Requires registration before use, including a confirmation code for email registrations. A potential privacy risk.
The app design, while clean, is not appealing.

Like other recipe apps, Yummly offers a library of recipes and a shopping list feature. Unlike others, however, it asks you up-front what your diet and allergy needs are so that results are fine-tuned to your specific needs.

Download For:

iOS

Android

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