Dietitians Picks of The 7 Paleo Apps
With apps designed to help you stay on track, monitor nutrients, and plan all your meals, following the paleo diet just got a little easier.
We chose the year’s best paleo apps for their comprehensive content, reliability, and high ratings so you can stay organized and nail those dietary guidelines.
How to choose a paleo diet app
With so many apps available, it can be challenging to know which one is worth downloading. Here are some factors to consider:
- Your budget. While some apps are free, others require a paid subscription or charge an additional fee for accessing premium features.
- Your experience level. If you’re just getting started with the paleo diet, it can be helpful to select an app that provides resources on how to actually follow the diet.
- Desired features. While some apps include food lists, tips, and recipes, others offer personalized meal plans and curated shopping lists.
- Your health goals. Consider what your goals are with following the paleo diet. For example, if you’re looking to lose weight, it’s worth choosing an app that offers food logging or even health coaching.
How we chose
We selected the best paleo diet apps using the following criteria:
- Relevance. While there are many nutrition apps on the market, we included options that offer resources specific to the paleo diet.
- Features. We looked for apps that offer a range of helpful features, such as recipes, shopping lists, and meal plans.
- Ratings. The apps below have mostly positive customer reviews.
- Vetting. All of the apps included have been vetted to ensure that they meet ishonest’s medical and business standards.
ishonest’s picks for the best paleo diet apps
Nom Nom Paleo
- Price: $5.99
- iPhone rating: 4.9 stars
Nom Nom Paleo is an award-winning app that takes the guesswork out of cooking on the paleo diet.
Downloading the app grants you access to more than 145 tantalizing recipes, all of which are free of gluten, soy, and refined sugar, as well as over 2,000 high- resolution step-by-step photos to help with the cooking process.
Unfortunately, there’s no free version of Nom Nom Paleo, and some reviewers have noted that many recipes require a slow cooker or instant pot, which could be a con for some people.
Eat This Much
Eat This Much is designed for people who’ve wished for a personal diet assistant.
Simply plug in your diet goals, food preferences, budget, and schedule, and Eat This Much will create a 1-day meal plan to help you meet your targets.
While the basic functions are available for free, you can upgrade to the premium version for either $59.88 per year or $8.99 per month.
Here are the extra features included with a premium membership:
- automatic 1-week meal planner
- family meal planning
- curated grocery lists
- grocery delivery service integration
- leftovers planning
- pantry tracking
Paleo Plate
Paleo Plate is a highly visual app that’s designed to make following the paleo diet as straightforward as possible.
It includes a growing collection of more than 150 paleo recipes, all of which feature pleasing images and easy-to-follow instructions.
There’s also the option to add ingredients to your shopping list and save your favorite recipes to quickly access them later.
For a one-time cost of $2.99, you can unlock even more tasty recipes.
Paleo Diet Guide: Eat Healthy
The Paleo Diet Guide: Eat Healthy is a great place to start if you’re new to the paleo diet.
It includes helpful food lists that cover what foods are allowed or not allowed when following the diet, along with basic information about the diet, potential health benefits, tips, and more.
The app is free and includes a variety of recipes, along with nutritional information for each.
Mealime
If you’re cooking for a family, you’ll want to check out Mealime.
During the signup process, you can select your desired diet plan, including paleo, as well as the number of people you’ll be cooking for: 2, 4, or 6.
Next, Mealime will recommend a few options, but it’s ultimately up to you to choose which recipes you want to include in your meal plan that week.
Once your menu is ready to go, the app will automatically generate an organized grocery list.
The paid version of the app costs $2.99 per month and provides features such as access to additional recipes, the ability to add your own recipes from other websites, nutrition tracking, calorie filters, and more.
Noom
While it isn’t technically a Paleo app, Noom offers an add-on paleo meal plan that Noom members can purchase for $49.
The meal plan allows you to mix and match meals and snacks to meet your needs, while also teaching you how to create your own meal plans along the way.
Noom is a particularly good option if you’re interested in losing weight, as you’ll be connected with a personal health coach and have access to a supportive community.
In addition to tracking your food intake, you’ll also receive daily lessons to help you develop sustainable, healthy habits.
Frequently asked questions
What do you eat on a paleo diet?
The paleo diet aims to follow a similar eating pattern as early hunter-gatherer human ancestors.
The diet is typically high in protein and low in carbohydrates because it doesn’t include sugars, grains, legumes, or dairy products.
Instead, the diet encourages whole, minimally processed foods, like vegetables, fruits, meat, fish, and poultry.
Is paleo the same as keto?
Though the paleo and keto diets have some similarities, they aren’t the same.
Both diets focus on eating mostly whole foods and avoiding sugar, legumes, and grains.
However, the paleo diet emphases total body wellness and the types of foods to eat, whereas the keto diet simply encourages a specific distribution of macronutrients.
For example, the keto diet recommends consuming no more than 5%–10% of calories from carbohydrates. In contrast, the paleo diet restricts some sources of carbohydrates, but not the amount (1).
Can you lose weight following the paleo diet?
Following the paleo diet may result in weight loss because it eliminates processed foods, which can be high in calories and lead to weight gain (2).
Several studies have shown the paleo diet to be effective for weight loss and reducing waist circumference. However, more research is needed on the long-term effects of the diet (3, 4).
Is the paleo diet healthy?
Thanks to its emphasis on whole foods, the paleo diet can be a nutrient-rich way to eat.
However, it’s also very restrictive, which can make it difficult to follow and potentially unsustainable in the long-term.
Furthermore, it eliminates nutritious food groups, like whole grains and legumes, which are rich in fiber and other important nutrients (5, 6).
Calcium can also become a nutrient of concern when following a paleo diet, as dairy isn’t allowed. Therefore, it’s important to consume nondairy sources of calcium, such as dark leafy greens, salmon, and sardines (4, 7).
The bottom line
Following the paleo diet can be tricky. But there are apps available to make adopting the diet easier.
They do this by offering features like food lists, meal plans, recipes, and more.
By using this list as a guide and considering your budget and desired features, we’re confident that you’ll find an app that’s right for you.
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