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Introduction – What is YAZIO?
YAZIO is an app featuring calorie counting, intermittent fasting, recipes and easy app integrations with other fitness products (such as Garmin and Fitbit). On entering their website, you are greeted with the title of ‘welcome to a healthier life’ and introduced to some of the things YAZIO suggest you can achieve with the app – building muscle, losing weight or eating healthier.
- Calorie counter (based on the Mifflin-St. Jeor Equation)
- Intermittent fasting tracker
- Recipes
- Packaged as a motivational coach rather than a diet app
Why am I using YAZIO?
I’m no stranger to calorie counters. They are a tool I’ve used over the years for various different reasons, such as times where I’ve looked to lose some extra pounds, gain some more muscle or fine-tune my diet to support specific fitness goals. I’ve used several different apps out there but never truly felt like any fitted my needs completely. They either involved expensive paywalls, limited food libraries or completely inaccurate macros.
For context, I personally enjoy intermittent fasting for some parts of the week but am generally pretty flexible about my diet beyond that. I don’t stick to strict plans or rules but instead focus on the end goal and what small changes I can make to get there. For exercise, I love a huge variety of sports and activities, from long walks and weightlifting to bouldering, horse riding and surfing.
When I was first contacted about whether I wanted to try out the PRO version of YAZIO, it honestly came at a really good time. I’d just come from training and completing a 10k race (my longest distance ever) and had watched my physique evolve to meet this new challenge. My food choices had also moved a fair distance from my baseline during this training period. While it was generally a good thing to experience the change of training focus (prior, I was 90% strength training I’d say), I was ready to find motivation and guidance again to help me to transition back into my normal activities with a healthy diet in mind.
To summarise, I went into this with my main goals being the following:
- To be more mindful of snacking and focus more on filling meals.
- To think about incorporating more nutritionally dense meals into my weeks.
- To keep track of portion sizes and ensure they fit the criteria for healthy weight and energy levels on training days.
Initial thoughts
On setting up, the app took me through an onboarding process in which it asked me, in-depth, about my goals and experience level with food logging in the past. My honest, initial reaction was surprise at how friendly and approachable it all felt. As I clicked through the quiz, it gave short motivational pieces of information that definitely helped me to feel confident in proceeding to use the app.
On opening the app, I first explored the intermittent fasting section and was pleased to find a variety of fasting plans for both beginners and advanced users alike. I also connected my Garmin profile so that my exercise would sync onto YAZIO – this was extremely fast and trouble-free, something I cannot say about other apps I’ve tried in the past unfortunately.
Pros
- Friendly – I really love how friendly and motivational the entire experience is with YAZIO. Not only does the app include things like streaks to instil a game-like desire to update your food log each day but it also features stories to create an induction to the app for the first few days. YAZIO also has a vibrant Facebook community, which the app encourages you to join. I’ve really enjoyed seeing others share their wins and challenges and really appreciate that the group appears well-moderated in the sense that any inappropriate subjects are quickly shut down.
- No experience necessary – while I am coming from a place of having had experience in the past with calorie trackers and adjusting my diet, I appreciate that not everyone does. YAZIO has just enough guidance for complete beginners to feel supported but not so much so that more advanced users feel frustrated.
- Creative recipes – on browsing the recipe section, I was pleased to see a varied array of choices. They involve either only a small amount of cooking experience or could be more complex, depending on confidence levels and preference. You can also easily adjust the portion sizes so you have the right measurements of ingredients (it automatically updates the list for you).
- Nice layout – the app is easy to use and, in my opinion, everything I needed to access was in the location I expected it to be. The app also functions well overall.
- Affordable – compared to other options out there such as other apps or programs, I feel that YAZIO is a cost-effective option (the app can also be used in free mode meaning you do not necessarily need to pay for PRO to get started). Ordinarily, the app costs £59.96 for 12 months (£2.50 per month) but there’s a special discount at the end of this article.
- Clever features – I really enjoy where the app will show you what a serving size might look like for a particular food you’ve logged. I also like that, after several days of logging, the app will give you a ‘streak freeze’ so you can take a day off logging without breaking your streak.
Cons
- Small food library – as with many apps out there, the food library is fairly small, so I did find myself manually adding in a lot of the foods we buy during our weekly shops. Despite this, the adding in of food items is easy and accurate – it allows you to add in the 100g/100ml variant and then automatically calculates the nutritional value based on the number of grams or millilitres you define as the portion size. This has come in incredibly handy when food packages only show a ‘per 100g/ml’ amount on the label.
- Lots of notifications – for those who like their phone on the quieter end, YAZIO does like to send a lot of notifications. Personally though, I appreciate this as it is just another way to keep me accountable or offer friendly tips. For example, in the morning while I am still fasting, it often sends a notification reminding me to drink more water. If it really does bother you however, there are notification options within the app.
- Slow barcode scanner – I’ve often found the barcode scanner to be quite slow when trying to scan a food into my library. I’ve noticed this to be a common issue with many apps I’ve used in the past though so this is not unique to YAZIO. A quick tip I’ve found helpful is to scan the food the other way up if it’s struggling to scan the first time (flip the barcode 180 degrees).
- More fasting flexibility – for me personally, I wish that there was slightly more flexibility with the fasting plan. I’d love to be able to define certain days where I was going to fast through breakfast but on other days, tell it that I’d be eating earlier in the day. Currently, you have to manually start/end fasts on days where you’re not going to stick to the defined plan.
Is YAZIO PRO worth it?
There are several advantages of YAZIO PRO, detailed in this article. For me personally, I will likely continue to pay for PRO after my current time expires as I really enjoy being able to automatically sync exercise and weight data from my Garmin. I also love that you can toggle on ‘weekend calories’ which means, if you tend to eat more on weekends due to the change of routine, the app adjusts your calories for this. Finally, the full flexibility of fasting options is only available on PRO – fasting is a vital aspect of my current health journey so I really value this feature.
Conclusion – Final YAZIO Review
I honestly have really enjoyed my time with YAZIO so far and will continue to use it over other apps I’ve tried in the past. I didn’t want to get too far into ‘results’ in this article as I know that not everyone is interested in seeing a stranger’s physique updates or similar, especially when we’re all on such unique journeys. I also am writing this after using the app for one month, which wouldn’t be long enough to see stark visual changes if doing things in the healthy way I’ve tried to follow. However, I will say that it has helped me to get well on my way to the body composition I’m looking for in the long term without feeling like I’ve restricted myself. It has also helped me to bring more focus to what it means to make healthy choices and fuel my body in the right way – something I’d lost sight of from being so laser focused on improving my running prior to the race. At no point during this have I had to avoid any food groups or turn my back on my favourite meals and snacks – it’s just been a case of being honest with myself about portion sizing and logging it all into YAZIO.
I also want to add here about times where I’ve not stayed within my goal calories within the app. I honestly believe that these times are inevitable in anyone’s health journey – whether it be after a rough day at work resulting in extra chocolate or a celebration you attend where there’s lots of amazing food around. The YAZIO Facebook community is really good at reminding people that you can always try again tomorrow and just give yourself grace with any lifestyle change. I also feel that the app’s overall friendly and approachable demeanour helps you to feel welcome in showing up, day after day, even if you’ve had a few days off here and there.
If a friend approached me, looking for an app to turn to to track calories, find recipe inspiration, meet intermittent fasting goals or all of the above, I’d definitely recommend they try YAZIO as I’ve honestly been having a really good experience.
If you’d like to try out the app, you can get 40% off with my YAZIO discount by following this link.
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