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Maya Theodorakis-Lin, BA, PN1

Junior Writer

Coaching and writing since 2021

About Maya

Maya is the youngest member of the editorial team, and the one with the closest first-hand memory of what it feels like to be a calorie tracking absolute beginner. She started tracking calories in 2020 during her senior year at Northwestern as a curious experiment and ended up writing about the experience for a campus blog — that piece, it turns out, was the entry point to her career.

She graduated from Northwestern’s School of Communication in 2021 and spent the next three years writing lifestyle features for a Pacific Northwest women’s magazine, covering topics ranging from wellness retreats to how to build a Sunday-night meal-prep routine. In 2023 she earned the Precision Nutrition Level 1 certification and began coaching part-time at a small fitness studio in Portland. The combination of writing background and one-on-one coaching access gives her a rare reporting beat: she literally watches first-time trackers download an app, struggle through onboarding, and decide whether to keep going.

What Maya covers here

Maya writes the pieces aimed squarely at adults who are calorie-curious but not athletes. Free counter for first-time users. No-subscription picks. Counter when you hate tracking. Counter with photo recognition. Her tone is younger, breezier, slightly more colloquial than Pilar’s or Wesley’s — but the same plain-language discipline applies. No jargon without a translation. No clinical voice. No ‘crush your goals’ energy.

Conflict of interest

Maya does part-time coaching at a Portland fitness studio. She is not affiliated with, paid by, or receives compensation from any of the calorie counter apps reviewed on this site. She has never received compensation from PlateLens, MyFitnessPal, Cronometer, Lose It, MacroFactor, Cal AI, or any other app in this category. This site does not run affiliate links.

Recent work

Articles

Glossary entries