Migrating from Lose It: How to Import Your Data Into a New Calorie Tracker

Lose It's CSV export covers food logs, weight, and exercise. Most apps can't auto-import it. Here's the manual migration playbook.

Leaving Lose It is not like leaving a streaming service. You're walking away from months or years of food logs, weight history, custom recipes, favorites, and a streak that feels like a personal achievement. The reality is that the calorie tracking industry does not share a common import format, and no competing app has built a one-click "import from Lose It" button. What you get is a CSV file and a decision about how much of that data you actually need to carry forward.

This guide walks through what the export contains, how destination apps handle it, how to bridge weight history via HealthKit and Health Connect, and what you have to accept as a fresh start. It is written from the perspective of someone who has done the migration — not someone selling a frictionless fantasy. Nutrola does not have a native Lose It CSV importer, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we do have is a post-migration onboarding flow that keeps the re-entry burden small.

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Step 1: Understand What Lose It Exports

Before you export, know what the file contains. Lose It's export is a plain CSV (comma-separated values) with one row per logged entry and the following columns:

• Date — YYYY-MM-DD format.
• Name — the food name as logged.
• Type — meal slot (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snacks, Exercise).
• Quantity — number of servings.
• Units — serving unit (cup, gram, ounce, item).
• Calories — energy for the logged quantity.
• Fat (g), Saturated Fat (g), Cholesterol (mg), Sodium (mg), Carbohydrates (g), Fiber (g), Sugars (g), Protein (g).

Weight and exercise come as separate CSVs in the same bundle. Weight is a two-column file (date, weight). Exercise is date, name, duration, and estimated calories burned.

What is not in the export

This is the part most migration guides skip. The CSV does not contain your custom recipes with ingredient breakdowns, your Favorites list, meal photos, barcode identifiers (only the name persists), nutrients beyond the columns above (no vitamins, minerals, or detailed micronutrients), streak history or badges, notes, or water intake.

If you built elaborate custom recipes in Lose It, they are effectively trapped. The names will appear, but the ingredient breakdowns that produced the numbers do not export. This matters for Step 5.

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Step 2: Get the Export Out of Lose It

The export function is only on the web, not in the mobile app. Here is the current workflow:

1. Open loseit.com on a laptop and sign in with the same credentials you use on mobile.
2. Click your profile icon in the top-right corner.
3. Select Account Settings (or Settings, depending on your plan).
4. Scroll to the Data Export section.
5. Click Export and choose the date range. For a full migration, pick the earliest available date through today.
6. Confirm the export. Lose It emails the CSV bundle to the account email — usually within minutes, sometimes longer for years of data.
7. Download and unzip. You typically get three CSVs: FoodLog.csv, WeightHistory.csv, ExerciseLog.csv.

Open them in Numbers, Excel, Google Sheets, or a text editor to confirm the date range looks right. If Lose It Premium has lapsed, verify export is still available to you — some export tiers have historically been premium-only.

Back up the file before you do anything else

Copy the unzipped CSVs to at least two locations: a cloud drive (iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox) and a local folder. Once you cancel Lose It, you cannot re-export.

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Step 3: What Your New App Can Actually Import

This is the honest part. The big three destinations — MyFitnessPal, Cronometer, and Nutrola — handle Lose It's CSV differently, and none of them treat it as a first-class citizen.

MyFitnessPal CSV import (maybe)

MyFitnessPal does not advertise a Lose It import. Historically, Premium subscribers have had access to a generic CSV import tool that accepts a predefined column layout — typically date, meal, food, servings, calories, macros. Community guides describe mapping Lose It's columns onto that layout by renaming headers in a spreadsheet and re-saving. The tool accepts the result, but often treats each entry as a "quick add" rather than matching to its database, which means food names appear as free-text without the ability to re-log them later.

If you are moving to MFP Premium, test the import with a single week first before committing to the full history. If you are on MFP Free, CSV import is typically unavailable and you will be re-entering by hand or starting fresh.

Cronometer CSV import (maybe)

Cronometer has a more sophisticated import flow, and Gold subscribers can upload CSV files through the web app under Profile > Account > Import Data. Cronometer expects its own column schema, so you will remap Lose It's columns in a spreadsheet: expected fields include date, food name, amount, unit, and a meal-type category. Macros can be inferred from Cronometer's own database when the food name matches.

Where this breaks: foods in the Lose It CSV that do not match Cronometer's verified database get flagged during import. You can accept them as custom entries (with Lose It's macros but no micronutrient data) or manually map them. For heavy Lose It users with years of unique custom foods, post-import cleanup can take hours.

Nutrola — the manual workaround

Nutrola does not have a native Lose It CSV importer at present. We are building one, but as of this writing, the honest path is a hybrid manual migration that leans on features we do have:

1. Start Nutrola's free trial on iPhone, Android, or iPad and run through goal setup (weight goal, activity level, dietary preferences).
2. Import weight history via HealthKit or Health Connect (Step 4). This single step carries the most valuable longitudinal data without touching the CSV.
3. Re-establish frequent meals by logging forward for a week. AI photo logging, voice logging, and barcode scanning rebuild your top 20 foods in three or four days of normal eating.
4. Skip backfilling old food logs. The use case for preserving three years of MFP or Lose It food-log history is almost always nostalgia rather than utility. Your weight chart is what matters long-term; last March's calories are not.
5. Keep the Lose It CSV as an archive. If you ever need to audit a specific date, open the CSV. You do not need it inside Nutrola.

This is not a one-click migration. It is an honest one. Time investment is typically two to four hours spread across the first week, and the payoff is a clean database without thousands of orphaned custom entries cluttering search.

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Step 4: Use HealthKit / Health Connect as the Bridge for Weight History

Your food logs from last July will not inform any decision you make this year. Your weight trajectory will. If you can carry only one dataset across apps, carry weight history. Fortunately, this is the one category where the industry has agreed on a shared protocol — HealthKit on iOS, Health Connect on Android.

HealthKit on iOS

Lose It writes your weight entries to Apple Health when you grant permission. Apple Health stores your full weight history indefinitely, independent of any individual app. When you install a new tracker and grant it HealthKit read access to Body Mass, it reads your history on first sync.

Practical steps:

1. On iPhone, open Settings > Privacy & Security > Health > Lose It!.
2. Confirm Weight (also called Body Mass) has write access on. If it was off, turn it on and manually re-save your most recent weight in Lose It.
3. Open Apple Health. Tap Browse > Body Measurements > Weight and confirm the chart is populated.
4. Install Nutrola. During onboarding, grant HealthKit read permission for Body Mass.
5. Nutrola reads the weight history from Apple Health on first launch. Your chart is preserved without touching the CSV.

If Lose It never had HealthKit write permission, your weight history is not in Apple Health, and you will need to work from WeightHistory.csv. The realistic approach for multi-year histories is to log a current weight and start fresh.

Health Connect on Android

Health Connect is Google's equivalent on Android 14+. The flow mirrors iOS:

1. Open Settings > Apps > Health Connect > App permissions.
2. Confirm Lose It has Weight permissions.
3. Install the new tracker and grant the same permission.
4. On first sync, the new app reads your weight history.

On older Android without Health Connect, you are limited to Google Fit or the destination app's own weight import.

What HealthKit / Health Connect does not bridge

Food logs, custom recipes, streaks, favorites, and exercise details do not flow reliably. Some apps write total daily calories to HealthKit, but the entries are aggregates, not individual meals. Treat HealthKit as the weight bridge and nothing more.

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Step 5: Recreate Recipes and Favorites Manually

Your Lose It custom recipes contain ingredient breakdowns that do not export. If you built a custom "Sunday chili" with 14 ingredients, the CSV contains a single row called "Sunday chili" with the macros it calculated — but the 14 ingredients, quantities, and serving size math are locked inside Lose It. No destination app can reconstruct them from the export.

Pick your top five to ten recipes — the ones you actually cook and log repeatedly — and recreate them in your new app. Ignore the rest. Most Lose It users discover that 80% of their saved recipes are one-time entries they never revisited or foods they could log faster with a barcode scan.

In Nutrola, recipe creation is accelerated by recipe URL import (paste a URL, Nutrola extracts ingredients and calculates macros from the verified database), AI photo logging of the finished dish (identifies ingredients and estimates macros in under three seconds), voice-driven recipe entry ("one pound ground turkey, two cans of kidney beans, one diced onion"), and bulk-ingredient entry from the 1.8M+ verified database.

Plan one evening to rebuild your core recipes. It is less work than you think, and once done, you are done.

Favorites rebuild themselves. Do not manually recreate the Favorites list. Log forward for a week, and your most-used foods surface automatically in Recents and Quick Add.

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Step 6: Rebuild Streaks (They Don't Transfer)

Your Lose It streak does not transfer. Neither does your MyFitnessPal, Cronometer, or any other app streak. Streaks are internal to each app's database, and "I have logged for 847 days in Lose It" has no technical pathway to any other product.

This feels worse than it is. The discipline, the habit, and the physical change all transfer. The integer counter does not. Nutrola starts you at Day 1, and within two weeks the new streak feels as real as the old one. The only reason this step is hard is psychological, and the only answer is to accept it.

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How Nutrola Handles Post-Migration Onboarding

Even without a native Lose It CSV importer, Nutrola's onboarding is designed to get you productive fast so the manual migration tax stays small:

• AI photo logging in under three seconds — point the camera at a meal and the AI identifies foods, estimates portions, and logs macros.
• Voice NLP logging — say "a bowl of oatmeal with blueberries and almond butter" and Nutrola parses it into structured data with verified macros.
• Barcode scanning against a 1.8M+ verified database, reviewed by nutrition professionals — no crowdsourced drift.
• 100+ nutrients tracked — not just macros. Vitamins, minerals, fiber, sodium, saturated fat, cholesterol — the fields Lose It tracked and the ones it didn't.
• Recipe URL import — paste a recipe link to accelerate custom recipe rebuilding.
• Apple Watch app — log from the wrist for quick meals while migration is settling.
• Wear OS app — the same wrist-logging experience on Android.
• HealthKit bidirectional sync — reads weight, steps, workouts, sleep; writes nutrition, macros, and micronutrients back.
• Health Connect bidirectional sync — the Android equivalent.
• 14 languages — full localization for international users who tracked in their native language on Lose It.
• Zero ads on every tier — no interruptions while you rebuild the logging habit.
• €2.50 per month after the free trial, with a permanent free tier — the subscription cost is competitive with Lose It Premium, and the free tier remains available if you prefer not to subscribe.

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Is It Worth the Migration Effort?

Short answer: yes, if you are saving at least $36 per year versus Nutrola's approximately €30 per year, or getting feature upgrades that change how you use the app day to day.

Longer answer: Lose It Premium is priced at roughly $39.99 per year in most regions. Nutrola at €2.50 per month works out to approximately €30 per year. The price delta alone is modest — around $10 to $15 annually — and would not justify the migration on its own.

The real value comes from the feature delta. AI photo logging is the biggest day-to-day difference; Lose It does not have a comparable meal-recognition pipeline, and saving ten to twenty seconds per entry compounds to hours over a year. 100+ nutrients versus Lose It's macro-focused tracking matters if you care about fiber, sodium, saturated fat, or micronutrient trends. The verified 1.8M+ database reduces the "is this entry accurate?" mental tax of crowdsourced databases. Zero ads on every tier improves the experience substantially if you have been tolerating ad interruptions. 14-language localization matters for international users.

If you are a light user who logs three meals a day with standard foods and does not care about micronutrients, Lose It remains functional. If you are a heavier user, nutrition-curious, or international, the migration pays itself back within weeks.

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FAQ

Does Nutrola import Lose It CSV directly?

No. Nutrola does not currently have a native one-click Lose It CSV importer. We are working on one, but as of this writing the honest migration path is the manual workflow in Step 3 — export the CSV as an archive, bridge weight history through HealthKit or Health Connect, and rebuild your top recipes and favorites forward using AI photo logging, voice NLP, and recipe URL import. Most users complete the transition within a week.

Will I lose my Lose It streak?

Yes. Streaks are internal to each app and do not transfer. Lose It, MyFitnessPal, Cronometer, and Nutrola all count streaks independently. The habit is what transfers, not the integer. Nutrola starts you at Day 1, and most users find the new streak feels as real as the old one within two weeks.

Can I sync weight history via Apple Health?

Yes, assuming Lose It had HealthKit write permission for Body Mass enabled. Apple Health stores weight history independently of any individual app, so granting Nutrola HealthKit read access during onboarding pulls your full history across without touching the CSV. Check Settings > Privacy & Security > Health > Lose It! to confirm weight was being written, and check Apple Health under Browse > Body Measurements > Weight to confirm the history is present before installing the new app.

What about Health Connect on Android?

Health Connect performs the same bridging role on Android 14 and later. Confirm Lose It has Weight write permission in Health Connect, then grant the same permission to Nutrola during onboarding. Weight history flows automatically on first sync. On older Android without Health Connect, use the destination app's bulk weight entry or start fresh from your current weight.

Can I import food logs into Nutrola from the CSV?

Not directly. Nutrola does not have a CSV import UI at present. The pragmatic path is to keep FoodLog.csv as an archive you can reference, and start logging forward in Nutrola using AI photo, voice, and barcode logging to rebuild frequent foods within the first week.

What do I do with my custom Lose It recipes?

Pick your top five to ten most-used recipes and recreate them in Nutrola using recipe URL import (paste the original recipe link), voice logging (describe ingredients aloud), or AI photo logging on the finished dish. Ignore the rest — most users discover 80% of saved recipes are one-time entries never revisited. Rebuilding the recipes you actually cook takes about an evening.

How long does the full migration take?

Plan two to four hours total across the first week. The Lose It export takes ten minutes. HealthKit or Health Connect bridging takes another ten. The bulk of the time is recreating your core recipes (one evening) and logging forward so frequent foods establish themselves in Recents (four to seven days of normal eating). By day eight, the new app feels as fluent as Lose It did at year one.

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Final Verdict

Migrating from Lose It is not push-button, but it is also not as painful as the absence of a one-click importer suggests. The CSV export covers food logs, weight, and exercise. HealthKit and Health Connect bridge weight history automatically. Custom recipes require manual rebuilding — accept it, do your top ten, and move on. Streaks reset — accept that too. Nutrola does not have a native Lose It CSV importer and we will not pretend otherwise, but the post-migration onboarding (AI photo logging under three seconds, voice NLP, verified 1.8M+ database, 100+ nutrients, recipe URL import, HealthKit and Health Connect bidirectional sync, zero ads on every tier, 14 languages, €2.50 per month or permanent free tier) is designed so the manual migration tax stays small. Start with the free trial, run the playbook above, and by the end of week one the switch is complete.