I Used MyFitnessPal for Two Years. Here's Why I Built Something Better.

I started tracking my calories the way most people do — I downloaded MyFitnessPal.

And for a while, it worked. The database was massive, the calorie math was accurate, and I felt like I finally had a handle on what I was eating. But before I wrote a single line of code for Wellitica, I spent months tracking my own food obsessively — testing every app I could find, logging every meal, breaking every streak. I needed to understand what actually worked before I built anything.

What I kept running into was the same gap.

I tried to log dal. Not some obscure regional dish — just dal. The kind made every other night in most Indian homes. What I found was a graveyard of user-submitted entries with wildly different numbers, no way to know which was right, and zero confidence in what I was actually tracking. Roti, sabzi, idli, poha — same story across the board. I was spending more time second-guessing entries than actually improving my health.

That was the first problem. The second was that MyFitnessPal only tracks one thing: calories in, calories out. It doesn't know about your sleep. It doesn't care if you missed your workout three days in a row. It has no idea that you've been stressed all week and that's probably why your eating is off. It just shows you a number and leaves you to figure out the rest. And features that used to be free quietly moved behind a paywall — for what the app actually delivered for someone eating Indian food, it wasn't worth it.

I looked at HealthifyMe too. Better Indian food coverage, but the features I actually wanted were locked behind a premium plan, and the UI felt like it was trying to show everything at once.

That's when I started building Wellitica.

Every formula in the app — from the Mifflin-St Jeor calorie targets to the habit loop design — is grounded in published research, not fitness influencer advice. I read the studies before I built the features. And because I'm a software engineer by trade, I built the infrastructure myself — I know exactly where your data goes, and what we never collect.

I'll also be honest about what I'm not: I'm not a nutritionist or a certified trainer. I'm someone who couldn't find the app I needed and decided to build it instead.

If you have a question, a complaint, or a feature you desperately need — reach me at hello@wellitica.com. I read every email.