what are your thoughts.
1: Is it worth the money
2: Is there a free App Comparable to it.
I
I haven’t used this app but I remember reading about it over at DiabetesMine.
https://www.healthline.com/diabetesmine/taking-an-insulin-pump-hiatus-hey-theres-an-app-for-that#3
https://www.healthline.com/diabetesmine/ask-dmine-best-carb-counting-app#3
If I were not on a pump, I would use an app like RapidCalc. Good luck.
Thank you. I’ll check it out.
I’m not familiar with that specific app or it’s features, but I’ve never found it necessary to pay for one. Last year, when I was trying to earn approval for my pump, I tried every app I could for diabetes tracking and calculations. Most didn’t last long because I didn’t like the interface.
MySugr turned out to be my favorite. It’s easy to use and has a wealth of information. Since I’m a rather competitive person, I found their taming the diabetes monster aspect motivational to use the app. I was really appreciative that it had a bolus calculator; and it calculates your insulin: carb ratio, correction factor, and estimated ha1c… All for free.
MySugar does have a paid subscription option, too, which frustrates me. I can’t believe that apps are now wanting close to a hundred dollars a year. I like the app… but not that much! I would have happily paid the normal $3-5 after a trial period, but not that price. Diabetes is expensive enough as it is, and we just can’t afford that. As A BIG plus for the MySugr team, they have elective challenges, and you can actually win the subscription features just by using the app. I think that’s pretty cool. Good for them.
The only big benefits of the paid subscription over the free version of mySugr that I noticed were an expanded food database for carb counting and the ability to print graphs directly from the app. Even without the paid version, you can export data to Excel, though.
I mostly stopped using MySugr because getting my pump rendered it useless to me. My only real complaint about the app was that after a while, I found it annoying just how much information I had to enter to actually tame my monster for the day. I don’t think you get enough points for entering blood glucose and insulin data. I found myself having to record things that I just didn’t care about to meet the point goal for the day, like tapping a button for each food type I ate at a given meal. I really don’t care if I ate nuts, dairy, meat, poultry, fish, fruit, and/or veggies at any given meal.
The one I still use on a daily basis is MyFitnessPal for carb counting. Since pretty much everything we eat in this house is prepared from scratch, it’s been really great for assimilating ingredients, or all the pieces of a meal. I love that I can enter and save my own recipes, search their massive database, and scan barcodes (works great for the pre-packaged bulk goods we get from natural grocers that otherwise don’t turn up in search results).
MyFitnessPal isn’t exactly made for diabetics, though. You have to learn the tricks. 1. To see the full carbohydrate content of a meal, you have to scroll down to the bottom of the app and click on “nutrition”. At the top of the next page, click on “macros”. Then, click on “carbohydrates”. That screen will show you all your carbohydrate info per meal. If you calculate net carbs, you’ll have to back up a screen to select “fiber”. 2. You can customize the number of meal categories you have under the options. I don’t ever use them all at once, but I added a snack after every main meal just to make sure I had a placeholder for everything I might eat in a given day. 3. When searching the database, select items they have the check mark. It means that the complete nutritional profile was verified by MyFitnessPal. Otherwise, it may have been incompletely or erroneously entered by a user.
MyFitnessPal also has an insanely extensive subscription service, but I haven’t seen a worthwhile reason to use it.
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I’ve used RapidCalc for years, and I thought (and still think) it’s definitely worth the few bucks that they ask for it. I don’t care about tracking which food I ate/eat, and I literally just wanted something to duplicate a pump’s “bolus wizard” for me- which means it has to calculate and show “insulin on board” or “active insulin” - and RapidCalc does that. I also like that it doesn’t need wifi or bluetooth to do anything, which means it works without a hitch when I am offline and out in the woods, but I doubt that’s a concern for many others. : /
I played with MySugr halfheartedly but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to actually calculate a dose… I know I can log a dose through it, but I thought the actual calculating function was only available to Pro users in the EU? Does anyone else know differently?