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With my diet, I'm trying to gain weight, and I'm using the following Calorie Counter app to track this:
http://fatsecret.com/connected/android
However the app is all based on losing weight, and therefore my targets are all in reverse, and the receipes available are all to do with low calorie diets.
Are there any Android apps available which are targeted for people trying to gain weight/muscle?
I, too, have an Andriod phone. After searching quite extensively, I could not find any apps that are aimed for gaining muscle weight. But... Calories are not the biggest factor in gaining muscle mass, although, it plays a slight part. Most lower and middle class households eat more than enough calories as it is. In order to gain muscle weight, it is good to remember these few things...
1) High weight, low reps. - Few, Fast, controlled reps with high weight is going to tense you muscles more than high reps with low weight. If you can do more than 20 reps, you need more weight.
2) Eat often. - Have food that is high in calories and protein at least every three hours. Protein is often overlooked. Meals, smacks, shakes, what ever. This will increase your metabolism, and increase muscle growth.
3) Stretching. - Stretching not only helps you recover after a workout, but further tears the muscle. As you probably know, muscle grows when there is trauma to the fibers. The muscle is then regrown, stronger than before.
4) Limit yourself. - It is easy to get sucked in to working out when you are bored. But you need to give your muscles time to repair themselves. Working out with muscles that still have trauma to them and are not fully repaired, can lead to serious injuries. Train no more than four times a week.
5) Sleep. - Sleep not only makes you feel better, but it's your body's time to recover. Many bodily functions shut down when you are sleeping. Leaving more resources to recovering the body mentally and physically. This is when most of your muscle regrowth will happen. So make sure you get plenty of sleep.
I find My Fitness Pal to have everything I need, possibly too many features for some, but most of them can just be ignored quite easily. With an extensive database of foods and the ability to scan packaging bar codes and recall recently logged foods, its pretty quick and easy to use.
It also has a calculator for recommended calorie intake based on weight, and weight loss/gain rate (0.25kg per week, 0.5kg per week, etc.) and target weight, but if you find its not working or for whatever other reason, you can choose your target calories manually. Macros can also be set to what you want based on percentage calories, and if you really want, you can track and set targets for micro-nutrients.
Other features include reminders for meal timing, weight tracking (lacks body fat tracking) and it can sync with compatible peripherals/activity trackers.
The app does not recommend or contain any recipes specific to weight loss or muscle growth, but anything you find online or in books can be stored as a complete recipe in the app, with full nutrition details and calorie count per portion, which speeds up the whole process, especially if you're sticking to a strict and repeating diet.
I'm glad to see that you focused on diet and exercise as a coordinated effort. It would also be beneficial to monitor RMR,BMI, and calories burned. Online calculators for these are available to make these calculations easy and are available at http://howtogainweight123.com/rmr-calculation-bmr/ Typically, just enter age, weight, height and activities you have done during the day. The calculator's will do the rest and tell you how many calories you use for the whole day and when at rest. This could help you to know how to adjust your diet to either gain weight or lose weight.
I use Simple Macro to track my macros/calories. It's a nice simple app which does exactly what I want it to.
As for setting your goal intake, a good place to start would be IIFYM.com. It has an easy to use calculator which will give you a set amount to eat per day based on your goals.
