You need to choose a specific IF cadence (there’s the 16:8, 5:2, alternate-day fast, and others), use schedules or timers, and develop the willpower to not break the fast. Not surprisingly, there are a number of excellent apps that can help. Here are the eight best IF apps for iOS and Android. The app can send you notifications when it’s time to start and stop your fast, and you can easily track your progress over time, which includes celebrating your fasting streaks and watching your weight change over time. The app is free with an in-app upgrade to the Zero Plus plan for $10 per month. If your needs are simple, the free version does literally everything you could need and gives you a half-dozen fasting choices. But if you want to build a custom fasting plan, you’ll need to upgrade. That’s not really the case, though; the Coach upgrade (which costs $56 per year if you buy an annual plan) simply unlocks many of the app’s premium fasting plans and includes special features like weekly challenges to keep you engaged. If you have your eye on one of the dozens of advanced plans, you might need to pay the premium, but the app includes a solid selection of a dozen fasts for free. Nonetheless, if you want to try every kind of intermittent fast imaginable, they’re pretty much all just a tap away. The app keeps you informed about when to fast and when to stop, and the overall interface is polished and easy to follow. Combined with the trophies to build your confidence and keep you on track, this is a compelling fasting app. Most of the good stuff is behind a paywall, but it’s a tiny paywall. While most fasting apps cost charge an ongoing subscription, FastHabit unlocks everything for a mere $3. That’s well worth it; you get enhanced stats, weight tracking, reminders about your upcoming fast, and more. If you like the way FastHabit works, you owe it to yourself to pay the upgrade for the full set of features. And the app rewards you with rich and detailed statistics screens that keep you informed about your progress, streaks, and other trophies. Unfortunately, none of those things are free. You can install the app for free, but to start using it, you’ll need to pay $3 per month to subscribe to the app. Not sure if you want to pay? You do get a three-day free trial, but you’ll need to remember to cancel your subscription if you decide not to continue. It will let you know how long you fasted, what your fasting history looks like, and how many pounds you’ve lost. But this app won’t remind you it’s time to put the food away for the day. Fastient does give you the ability to leave free-form notes, though, which means you can use the app to journal as you diet. Want to track what you’ve eaten, how you feel, and when you slipped? Fastient records it all and lets you review it at any time using the ridiculously simple three-tab interface. Vora’s community feature is nice in principle, but it’s currently pretty bare-bones. There’s no way to search or browse for anything except member names, so you can’t search out conversations of interest. You should probably lure your friends to Vora and form your own community because right now, it isn’t easy to get to know strangers. But before we get to that, Life Fasting Tracker not only tracks your fasting, but it syncs with your Fitbit and logs data like weight, waist size, glucose levels, and ketones (if you’re on a keto diet, by the way, this is the tracker for you, because it leans into ketone level tracking pretty hard). But the app has so much more, like an active in-app community. Vora, which also has a built-in community, could learn a lesson from Life Fasting’s easy-to-use community circles. There’s also a library of educational videos and articles, as well as the opportunity to chat one-on-one with coaches on topics like weight loss, exercise, diet, cancer support, and more (for $15 per 30 minutes). And if you upgrade to Life+, you get the opportunity to create custom schedules with reminders, choose from a library of IF routines, and more. You can add notes and write about how the fast is making you feel; as soon as you do, a timer starts, and it tracks the length of time until you snap the next photo. As long as you are diligent about photographing your meals and snacks, you’ll be able to track your fasting periods. All that is free. It costs $30 per year to go premium which adds a handful of extra features, like the ability to reuse photos, track drinks, and track activities as well. The premium features are a work in progress, as the developer considers the app to be in beta, and rolls out new features to the premium subscribers first.
