Frugal weight loss solutions - itrackbites review

Last year, I bit the bullet and paid for a weight loss program for the first time with a goal to lose 20lbs. I did Weight Watchers online for about 6 months, after my intro price ended it was $20 a month but I did loose the weight I wanted.

Now, for something that works, $20 a month doesn't feel like too much to me and I wasn't doing well with the free solutions like My Fitness Pal. I think when there is money on the line I am more willing to do the hard work! Nevertheless, I want to save money wherever I can.

In some online Weight Watchers groups, I heard about itrackbites. It's basically a Weight Watchers knock off and I do like a good generic! Itrackbites has several free options for old Weight Watchers plans and a lot of people use it when they want to follow an older plan. For the newest Weight Watchers plan, Freestyle, you have to pay for the yearly fee. This also gives you access to some additional options on the itrackbites app like the food scanner and a restaurant guide.

The premium itrackbites is $35.99 for a year compared to $19.99 a month for Weight Watchers online! So, I thought I would give it a try and see how I liked it. If I used it for 2 months as a trial, I would still pay less than two months of Weight Watchers online.

I've been using it about a month now and here are the pros and cons.

Pros
The main pro is the cost. Really itrackbites doesn't have any features that are better than Weight Watchers app but this is a big pro. If I can get almost the same thing for a year for less than what I'd pay for two months? That's a big win.

It has most of the features you're used to with WW and it also syncs with my Fitbit Alta HR to give me points for my steps.


Cons
I don't think these are big issues but there are some areas where itrackbites isn't as good as the Weight Watchers app:

• Some point counts aren't accurate for Freestyle. This is the main thing that annoys me because you can't effectively follow the plan if the point counts are off. The ones I have seen, however, scan much higher than their Freestyle values but I'm sure it goes both ways. In fairness though, some point counts on the Weight Watchers app are not up to date for freestyle, for example if you scan zero point items they often have points.
• The database isn't quite as good. Weight Watchers normally has both a weight and count option, itrackbites normally only has the count and I like to weigh things. Also I think the search function on Weight Watchers' app works a little better.
• The community feature on itrackbites is seriously lame. It's basically just a stream, you can't follow anyone or see top posts. You can only search on hashtags or see the most recent posts in a feed. What I really liked about the WW Community was that you could follow people who's posts you liked and I couldn't figure out any way to do this on itrackbites so I gave up on their community feature pretty quickly.
• The recipe builder doesn't work as well. I have only used this feature a couple of times but it was wonky, especially if I had multiple servings of something after setting the serving size. So pay attention when using this feature to make sure it updates your points accurately.

Overall, the itrackbites app is a decent substitute for the WW app and can save you a lot of money but I do miss some of the features from the WW app!

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