Why I Dropped MyFitnessPal And Switched To Eet Meter For Serious Calorie Tracking

I did not expect to care this much about a food tracking app.

Yet halfway through my GLI trajectory in the Netherlands, MyFitnessPal was actively getting in the way. Not just annoying. Wrong.

So I dropped it and went all in on Eet Meter, the very Dutch, very unsexy app from the Voedingscentrum.

If you are doing GLI, working with a dietitian, or just trying to get accurate Dutch food data instead of crowdsourced chaos, this is what actually changed for me.

The context: GLI, dietitian, real constraints

I am in a GLI program. That means regular check-ins with a lifestyle coach and a dietitian, bloodwork, and actual goals that affect long term health, not just a summer cut.

The dietitian wanted to see food logs. Not vibes. Not screenshots of my “good days”. She wanted accurate intake over weeks, with context around meals and patterns.

I started with MyFitnessPal because of course I did. Everyone does. It has the brand, the integrations, and the huge database. It feels like the obvious choice.

It also slowly drove both me and my dietitian insane.

MyFitnessPal: impressive, noisy, and misaligned with Dutch reality

On paper MyFitnessPal looks amazing. Barcode scanning, auto-complete, millions of items. For a while, I loved the speed.

Then I started to compare it to the labels of actual Dutch products I had in my kitchen. Not American products. Jumbo, Albert Heijn, Lidl. Typical Dutch stuff.

The differences were not small.

• Different calorie counts for the same brand and product.
• Portion sizes that did not match what Dutch packaging actually uses.
• Weird entries like “homemade hutspot” with 10 different versions, none documented.

My favorite broken pattern was the barcode roulette. Scan a Dutch product, get three user-created entries, each with slightly different macros. Which one is real? Who knows. Pick one and move on, right?

Except when you sit in a GLI consult and your dietitian pulls up your numbers, “pick one and move on” gets you garbage in, garbage out.

Crowdsourced databases are great until you need precision

MyFitnessPal runs on user generated data. That is smart for growth. It is terrible if you care about standardized, verifiable data.

For a US user eating mostly big-brand stuff, this might be fine. For a Dutch user inside a medically supervised trajectory, it is a problem.

I kept seeing three concrete issues.

• Duplication everywhere. You search for a basic Dutch product and see five versions with almost identical names and different macros.
• No clear authority. There is no visible link to the NEVO table, no Dutch-specific reference, no guarantee that this matches what a Dutch dietitian uses.
• Silent updates. User entries get edited without clear versioning. Did those 80 calories vanish because the product changed, or because someone “fixed” the entry?

When my dietitian asked, “Which database is this based on?” I had no good answer. It was vibes and averages, crowdsourced across the planet.

How Eet Meter showed up in my GLI sessions

During one consult my dietitian simply said, “If you want the numbers to match what we use, switch to Eet Meter”.

No affiliate link. No upsell. Just a professional trying to use the tools that exist in the Dutch ecosystem.

Eet Meter uses the NEVO database. That is the official Dutch food composition database that dietitians and researchers work with. It is boring in all the right ways.

So I installed Eet Meter. The experience looked like government software from 2014. No dark mode, no fancy streaks. I almost noped out on day one.

I am glad I did not.

UX tradeoffs: flashy global app vs slow honest local app

MyFitnessPal feels like a product team iterated on it every week for five years. Eet Meter feels like it barely has a product team.

If you judged by UI polish only, MyFitnessPal wins without effort. But UX is not the same as UI.

For my use case, three UX details in Eet Meter matter more than all the confetti and streaks in MyFitnessPal.

1. The food search actually matches Dutch reality

In Eet Meter, I type “bruin brood” and I get standardized Dutch entries that line up with NEVO. No spam, no random American entries, no “Grandma’s brown bread” with 600 calories per slice.

It feels constrained. That is the point. Instead of hundreds of near-duplicates, I pick the closest standardized option and move on.

This matches how dietitians think. They do not care about the exact artisan sourdough from that one bakery. They care about a reliable baseline for “whole wheat bread slice”.

2. Portion sizes that line up with packaging and coaching

MyFitnessPal usually pushes grams and cups. Cups are irrelevant for most Dutch products. Grams are fine in theory, but most people do not weigh everything that hits their plate.

Eet Meter leans into typical Dutch units.

• Slices of bread.
• Glasses of milk.
• Standard plates or spoons for certain meals.

Is that perfectly precise? No. But for GLI you do not need micromanaged bodybuilding macros. You need consistent, understandable inputs you can repeat without friction.

My dietitian literally used the same units when we talked through meals. That one detail alone reduced the mental load of tracking.

3. Visuals focused on patterns, not streaks

MyFitnessPal loves streaks and daily targets. Eet Meter is calmer. It pushes pattern awareness over time.

Inside a GLI trajectory, pattern beats perfection. You want to see “do I consistently hit enough protein, fiber, and vegetables” not “did I break my streak on that stressful Thursday”.

I found it easier to open Eet Meter after a bad day. The app does not guilt-trip me with broken streaks and sad icons. It just shows what I ate and how it compares to reference values.

Data quality: where Eet Meter absolutely destroys MyFitnessPal for GLI

This is the real reason I switched.

Eet Meter is plugged into NEVO. That means when I log “halfvolle melk” or “volkoren pasta”, I can be reasonably sure the macros match what the Dutch health system expects.

My GLI coach and dietitian do not have to translate from some random American database back into Dutch guidelines. We are literally looking at the same data sources.

We noticed it in a few meetings. Using MyFitnessPal, my logged intake looked oddly low in fiber and suspiciously inconsistent in calories for similar days. With Eet Meter, the numbers started making sense.

Not perfect, but consistent. That is a huge difference.

Working with a dietitian: less arguing about the app, more about the food

When I used MyFitnessPal, half our consults looked like this.

• “This seems low for that meal.”
• “Maybe the entry is wrong.”
• “Can you show me the product next time?”

We spent time debugging the log instead of talking about my habits.

Once I switched to Eet Meter, the conversation changed.

• “You see this gap in protein around lunch all week?”
• “Vegetables are fine on weekdays, but weekends are empty.”
• “Let us tweak your breakfast so you are not hungry at 11.”

No more battles over whether my tracking app was lying. The shared assumption became that the data was close enough to reality that we could plan around it.

What I missed from MyFitnessPal, and why I still stayed with Eet Meter

To be clear, MyFitnessPal still beats Eet Meter on a lot of typical app checkboxes.

• Cleaner UI and typography.
• Faster search with autocomplete.
• Better integration with wearables and other apps.

As a web experience developer, I appreciate all of that. I care about interfaces. I nitpick transitions and spacing.

I still switched and stayed with Eet Meter.

The reason is simple. For my GLI trajectory and long term health, data quality and alignment with my dietitian beat convenience and polish.

I need a tool that supports a medical process, not a product that optimizes engagement metrics.

Where Eet Meter is objectively clunky

I am not going to pretend Eet Meter is magical.

Some real annoyances from daily use:

• The app feels slow compared to modern consumer apps.
• The UI is visually dated, especially if you are used to polished fitness apps.
• There is less flexibility around custom recipes and weird niche products.

I think Eet Meter would benefit from a serious UX pass. Not to add more features, but to reduce friction in the basic loop of “open app, log meal, close app in under 30 seconds”.

Why localization matters more than global scale here

Global products are great for a lot of things. I use American tools for development, design, and note taking every day.

For food, local context matters a lot more.

Portion norms, typical meals, cultural habits, supermarket products, and official guidelines differ by country. A generic global database will always have gaps, approximations, and mismatches.

For casual tracking that might be good enough. For a GLI program that affects your health risk profile, I want less guessing.

Eet Meter is clearly built for Dutch eating patterns. From the examples in the app to the way it talks about meals, snacks, and categories, it assumes a Dutch baseline.

My dietitian is working from that same baseline. We are finally speaking the same language.

How I actually use Eet Meter day to day

People often ask “How do you keep up with logging?” The honest answer is that I do it lazily on purpose.

I do not aim for perfect logs. I aim for enough data to spot patterns over weeks.

My routine looks like this.

• Breakfast and lunch are usually similar, so I save a couple of common meal presets.
• For dinner, I log the main components instead of chasing exact gram-level accuracy.
• If a day goes totally off the rails, I still log the rough layout: big pizza, three beers, late snack. Pattern over precision.

Because Eet Meter keeps the choices limited and contextual, logging stays mentally cheap. There is no endless scroll of almost identical items.

That mental cheapness is underrated. It is the main reason I did not quit tracking after two weeks.

Who should probably switch to Eet Meter

If you live in the Netherlands and you are:

• In a GLI program.
• Working with a dietitian or lifestyle coach.
• Interested in long term health metrics, not just aesthetics.

I would seriously consider dropping MyFitnessPal and moving to Eet Meter.

If you mainly care about fitness community features, global recipe sharing, and integration with your smartwatch, then MyFitnessPal or similar apps might still fit you better.

For me, Eet Meter aligned with the real people I work with on my health. That mattered more than the global feature race.

Final thought: pick the tool your future self can trust

Ten years from now I will not care that MyFitnessPal had nicer charts. I will care whether I built realistic habits and reduced my health risks.

Eet Meter is not exciting. It is not pretty. It is boring in a way that builds trust over time.

If your health trajectory runs through the Dutch system and you are already committing time and energy to GLI, it makes sense to use the same data foundation your professionals use.

That is why I switched, and why I am probably not coming back.