About.com Rating

Updated December 01, 2014.

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Expecting Nutrition is an app and website combination for pregnant mothers. It includes a place for you to track your daily food intake so that you can ensure that you are making healthy choices. Often I find that the mothers that I work with say that they are eating well but they don’t really know what they are eating until they write it down. These days, having an app that you can take with you makes these sorts of tasks much easier.

In particular, this app creates graphs and charts that you can share with your health care provider so that they can also monitor your nutrition. The app is easy to use and adds a bit of convenience to your daily life.

Main Features

Expecting Nutrition has five main features: charts for tracking your nutritional data, daily food logs to record your snacks and meals, weight logs to track your pregnancy weight gain, blood glucose logs to keep your blood sugar recorded (if that is something your health care provider recommends that you do) and the ability to send or print your reports to send to your nutritionist or practitioner. The app comes preloaded with many different foods in it – everything from individual ingredients to popular convenience and fast food foods. Another feature that I particularly enjoyed using was the “quick water” button where you can easily add how many glasses of water, including how many ounces each glass was, throughout the day. This really helped me stay accountable to drinking enough water, which is important for everyone, not just pregnant mothers.

The app particularly logs the time, food name, servings, calories, total fat, saturated fat, trans fat, sodium, carbohydrates, dietary fiber, sugar and protein daily. When you enter a food, it also gives you the option of entering how many servings you ate, in incremental amounts. This is really important to pay attention to because most of us are eating more than the suggested serving sizes of foods.

If you work closely with your practitioner or your nutritionist, you can e-mail your reports directly to them. This makes it easier for them to get specific information about what you are eating, your blood glucose and your weight patterns. For mothers who are experiencing gestational diabetes, keeping track of this information and regularly sharing it with their providers is key to keeping both mom and baby healthy.

Not Just for Pregnancy

Expecting Nutrition is obviously marketed for pregnant mothers but I found that it was also very helpful to me as a nursing mother. While breastfeeding does not require optimal nutrition, it helps moms to stay healthy to nourish the mother while nourishing the baby. I was able to track daily my nutrition and look at things like “Am I eating enough calories?” “Am I eating too many processed foods over the course of a week?” “What does my protein intake look like?” This is an app that you can use for a long time and can be used for multiple pregnancies.

Other Thoughts

The one thing that I was a little taken back about was the cost of this application. For all of its functionality, the $10 cost is a bit out of range for other apps available that do similar things. If you think about how long this app could be useful to you, it may help you make the investment. (Edited to add: They've recently dropped their price to $2.99 making this a great investment.)

The application also automatically syncs with the website, which is nice for those times that you want to log something or look at something larger or you are using your phone for other purposes. Both the application and the website work with a login and password combination so that if someone were to look at your phone, they would not necessarily be finding out your weight. The app and the website also both have built-in technical support so that if you have questions, you can e-mail someone to get help with your problem.

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Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.