For first-time calorie counters · No affiliate links · Plain language How we pick · Why we don't take commissions
What's the Best Calorie Counter
PG

Pilar Gutiérrez-Larsson, RD, CDN, MA, BS

Editor-in-Chief

RD since 2015

About Pilar

Pilar grew up in a Spanish-Swedish household in Queens, where dinner was a hybrid of mussels in saffron broth and gravlax with potatoes — and where, importantly, no one counted calories. She came to the field of nutrition because she watched a family member go through the diet-of-the-month wringer for a decade and emerge from it more confused and less healthy than when she started. The premise of Pilar’s clinical practice, and the editorial premise of this site, is that calorie counting is a tool, not a religion: useful for many people, optional for others, harmful for a few. The job of a good app is to support the tool’s use without colonizing the user’s relationship with food.

After graduating from NYU Steinhardt in 2014 and completing her dietetic internship, Pilar became a Registered Dietitian in 2015 and went on to earn a Master’s in Health Communication from Hofstra in 2018. Her thesis was on plain-language framing in patient-facing nutrition handouts — how to write a daily-calorie message that lands for someone reading at a sixth-grade level, without dumbing the science down. That research is the editorial DNA of this site.

Six years in outpatient counseling

From 2018 through 2024, Pilar was a staff dietitian at a community health center in Queens, splitting her time across general adult nutrition, prenatal counseling, and group education for adults with prediabetes. Her one-on-one caseload was overwhelmingly first-time trackers. She watched, repeatedly, the same scene: a person trying calorie tracking for the first time, downloading the app whose name they remembered from a friend, getting overwhelmed by paywalls and macro charts within forty-eight hours, and quietly giving up. Most of her counseling was about un-doing the gravity of that initial bad onboarding.

This site is her attempt to fix the upstream problem. If the first article a brand-new tracker reads is friendly, written for them, and recommends an app whose free tier is actually usable, the giving-up rate drops. That’s the entire goal.

What Pilar covers here

Pilar writes the keystone “What’s the Best Calorie Counter for Beginners” guide that re-anchors every year, plus the major beginner-onboarding pieces: how to start without obsessing, easiest counters to use, counters for women, counters for the calorie-curious who hate tracking. She is the gating editor on every piece of content on this site for two specific things: (1) plain-language tone, no clinical jargon; (2) eating-disorder-aware framing on any tracking content.

Conflict of interest

Pilar is no longer in clinical practice. She has no current paid relationships with any calorie counter app, weight-loss program, supplement company, or pharmaceutical manufacturer. She has never received any compensation from PlateLens, MyFitnessPal, Cronometer, Lose It, MacroFactor, Cal AI, Yazio, FatSecret, or any app that appears in our recommendations. This site does not run affiliate links and does not accept sponsored placements.

Recent work

Articles

Glossary entries