Product review: Healthy Life Food Tracker

When I was first asked to write this review, I thought, Not another tracker.

After all, there have been several in recent years, such as My Fitness Pal and Everyday Diet Diary. But this one is different. It works by using your Everyday Rewards card AND your shop at Woolworths.

 This post has been sponsored by healthylife  

What is it?

 Healthylife Food Tracker is a free tool to help you achieve a more balanced diet. Developed in partnership with Woolworths, it helps you assess the balance of foods that make it to your plate, based on the groceries you buy. It shows you your shopping patterns over time, which helps you become aware of your shopping habits and inspires you to make healthier food choices.

If you shop for some items at other stores or markets, the tracker won’t capture this information, so bear in mind that it may not give you a complete picture of your household’s food intake.

To help solve this, you simply estimate how much you shop at Woolworths (from 0% to 100%) and the tracker does the rest. When testing, I applied from 50% to 75% across the categories, because I have two Woolworths stores near me and shop there quite a lot. It’s a near-enough estimate.

 The Food Tracker

 Once you click Get Started (under the healthylife Food Tracker logo), you select: 

1. The number of people in your household (I chose two).

2. The percentage of shopping you do at Woolies. I allocated my Woolworths shopping as follows:

 50% for Vegetables & Legumes

 75% for Fruits

 75% for Dairy & Alternatives (e.g. milk, cheese, yoghurt)

 50% for Meat & Alternatives

 75% for Grains (e.g. bread, rice, pasta)

 You choose in increments of 25% from 0% to 100%.

 You can also select whether you shop Weekly, Fortnightly (this is what I chose) or Monthly. This gives you the most representative view and lets you get the most out of Food Tracker.

 A bar chart shows you the five main food groups: Vegetables & Legumes, Fruits, Dairy & Alternatives, Meat & Alternatives, and Grains. 

The chart shows how many serves you need to consume over the next seven days (from your last shop) across the five main food groups to reach your recommended targets. These are based on the Australian Dietary Guidelines and Australian Guide to Healthy Eating for the total household number you entered. 

The chart also shows the proportion of your shop among these five food groups, and between Main Food Groups and Sometimes Foods & Drinks (discretionary items). Luckily for me, mine showed 83% from the Main Food Groups, with only 17% from Sometimes Foods & Drinks. The average for the Aussie population, however, is about 33% from Sometimes Foods & Drinks.

You can see the balance of your shop, letting you know how many serves of food from each food group you’ve already consumed and how many you’ve got left for that week or fortnight.

The app has handy little pop-ups to explain what everything means. For example, I clicked on a pop-up explaining that my household shopping was being compared to the serves recommended in the Australian Dietary Guidelines. By clicking on the link, you’re taken straight there to read more.

Overall, the app was clear and easy to use. I really liked that it worked out how many serves I’d eaten and showed me how many more I needed to eat to reach my goals.

The app recommended that I enrol in one of their short five-day health programs about sugar management. With these, you sit back and let healthylife deliver a wealth of knowledge to you. All you have to do is keep engaged and you’ll reap the benefits. Your goal is to understand the real facts about sugar and boost your nutrition by eating fewer “added” sugar foods. The incentive? You’ll receive 200 Everyday Rewards points.

On the site

The website healthylife.com.au contains many things to do with nutrition. For instance, there are the three popular programs, such as “Eat more veggies”, “Manage sugar intake” or “Move more”. Under Learn, you’ll spot five lessons:

1. Fitness
2. Food & Nutrition
3. Health
4. Lifestyle & Wellbeing
5. Looking Good.

 If I click on Food & Nutrition (a fave of mine), there are posts covering “What’s in season in autumn for a low FODMAP diet” and “Autumn low FODMAP fruits”. As part of Food & Nutrition, I can select Diet, which offers me recent posts on “Going for grains!” and “The perks of a well-stocked pantry”.

Diet

In this section, you’ll see posts such as “7 easy ways to turn pantry staples into a meal (or snack)” and “The difference between a plant-based diet and vegan”. There are also posts on:

• Kids’ Nutrition
• Low FODMAP Diet
• Healthy Weight
• Plant-based Eating.

Shop

Here you'll find a wide range of products including health foods, personal care & beauty, vitamins and supplements, eco-friendly household products plus a whole lot more. For more, go to  https://www.healthylife.com.au/shop

 Programs

Here, you’ll read about the small, achievable changes you can make to live a healthier life. If you’re like most people, you probably have super-good intentions when it comes to living healthy but, sometimes, it just feels too hard. That’s why they’ve created Ways to Well, a series of programs to help you make small easy changes. There’s a financial incentive, too; you collect 200 Everyday Rewards points when you complete a healthylifeHealthy Life program.

 Book a call

You can also have a discovery call with a health professional from their in-house health team for healthy eating advice, how to choose the right product or a bit of guidance on where to turn for health information.

Overall score:  45 out of 50 or 4.5 apples                                                                       

Sign up to Food Tracker now:  Click here

The final word

This is a great site, plus you get the handy Food Tracker. If you shop regularly at Woolworths, it’s worth signing up because it’s so convenient. It’s good to see bigger companies employing dietitians and dietetic organisations to write the posts and programs.