The hardest part of switching trackers isn’t learning a new app. It’s starting over. Months of logged meals and weigh-ins stay behind in the old app.
Fit Shapes imports your history from five apps: MacroFactor, Cronometer, Lose It!, Cal AI, and MyFitnessPal. You export a file from the old app, choose it in Fit Shapes, check what will come across, and confirm. If your old app saved food to Apple Health, Fit Shapes can also read its daily totals from there, with no file at all.
Why your history matters
Your history is more than a record. It gives Fit Shapes a head start.
Fit Shapes measures what you burn from your own log. Over about the last six weeks, it compares what you ate with how your trend weight moved, and the difference is your expenditure. Until it has that history, your targets start from a standard formula, which is a reasonable guess and wrong for most people by some amount. I wrote more about this in How Adaptive Targets work.
If your imported history reaches into the last six weeks, Fit Shapes uses it straight away. Your expenditure starts from your real data, not from the formula. Older history still fills your log, so you can look back at it, but it can’t set today’s numbers.
What comes across from each app
Every app exports something different, so the import takes what each one gives.
| App | What comes across |
|---|---|
| MacroFactor | Every food entry, your weigh-ins, and your body fat |
| Cronometer | Your daily totals and your weigh-ins. Each food too, if your export has its calories |
| Lose It! | Every food entry and your weigh-ins |
| Cal AI | Every food entry |
| MyFitnessPal | Your meal totals and your weigh-ins |
| Apple Health | The daily totals that another app saved to Health |
A few details are worth knowing:
- MyFitnessPal exports meal totals, not individual foods, so each meal comes across as one entry. Its export also needs a paid MyFitnessPal plan.
- Cronometer exports from its website, not from the app. On a free Cronometer account, the food export has no calories, so each day comes across as one daily total.
- Lose It! doesn’t record times, so each entry gets its meal’s usual time.
- Apple Health works for apps that save food to Health, like Cronometer or Noom. You choose the app, and each day comes in as one daily total. The individual foods stay in that app.
- MacroFactor days that you marked as partially logged stay marked, so the weekly check-in leaves them out, as it does for a partial day you mark in Fit Shapes.
The steps for each app are in Import from another app.
Nothing counts twice
Before anything is saved, Fit Shapes shows you what it found: the date range, the number of entries and weigh-ins, and anything it will skip. You confirm the import from that screen.
- A day you already logged in Fit Shapes is skipped. If you used both apps for a while, your Fit Shapes days win.
- A weigh-in you already have wins over the imported one.
- Two imports never stack. If you import from two apps over the same days, the first import keeps those days.
- You can import the same file again. Nothing is added twice.
- Goals and targets don’t come across. Fit Shapes sets its own, and the weekly check-in adjusts them.
Imported entries show as Imported in your log, so you can always tell them apart from what you logged in Fit Shapes.
And you can take it with you
Your history should be yours in both directions. Export data in Account saves your whole history as one CSV file: your food log, weigh-ins, day marks, and targets, plus your goal and saved foods. The app builds the file on your iPhone, and we don’t receive a copy. It opens in Numbers, Excel, or Google Sheets. See Export your data.
I hope you never need it. But nobody should stay with an app because their history is stuck in it.