How to Export Data From Lifesum: The Complete 2026 Guide

Lifesum's official export is minimal. For full data, file a GDPR subject access request — here's how, plus manual workarounds.

Lifesum has been a household name in European nutrition tracking for more than a decade, with millions of users logging meals, macros, weights, and recipes inside its Swedish-designed interface. When those same users try to move their history somewhere else — whether to a more accurate tracker, a cheaper subscription, or a fully verified database — they discover that Lifesum's official export is a one-page PDF summary and very little else. No CSV, no JSON, no structured food log, no timestamped macro breakdown.

That leaves most users stuck between two unappealing choices: abandon years of data and start fresh, or stay on a subscription they have outgrown. Neither is necessary. European data protection law gives every Lifesum user the right to request a full copy of their personal data, and a short list of manual workarounds can rescue the pieces that the GDPR response does not structure for you. This guide walks through exactly what Lifesum exports on its own, how to file a compliant Article 15 request, the manual rescues for food logs, weights, and recipes, and where to take the data once you have it.

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What Lifesum Officially Exports

Inside the Lifesum app, the built-in export is deliberately minimal. Most users can generate a PDF summary of recent activity through the profile or settings area — the exact path varies by app version, but it generally lives under Profile → Settings → Privacy → Export my data or a similarly worded option. What you get is typically a PDF that lists an aggregate view of the last few weeks of logging, your registered goals, and a summary of macros.

This PDF is not a data export in the engineering sense of the word. It is a human-readable report. You cannot open it in Excel. You cannot filter it by date. You cannot re-import it into MyFitnessPal, Cronometer, or Nutrola. It is designed to be printed and shown to a nutritionist or coach, not to move your history to a new app.

For structured data — every food item you ever logged, every weight entry with its timestamp, every custom recipe you built, every barcode scan, every water-intake event — Lifesum provides no first-party export path. The company stores this data internally and uses it to power its features, but it does not expose a download button for the raw records. This is where data protection law becomes your most useful tool.

If you only need a broad summary of the past month to show a healthcare provider, the in-app PDF may be enough. For any other purpose — moving apps, archiving, integrating with a coach's spreadsheet, or analyzing your own patterns — you will need to go further.

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GDPR Data Subject Access Request

Because Lifesum is a Swedish company with its user base primarily inside the European Union and the United Kingdom, it is bound by the General Data Protection Regulation. Article 15 of the GDPR gives any identified user the right to obtain a copy of the personal data a controller holds about them, in a commonly used electronic format, free of charge, within one month of the request. This is known as a Data Subject Access Request, or DSAR.

Lifesum users anywhere in the world can also typically request this, because Lifesum's own privacy policy extends the right to all accounts. Users outside the EU may rely on equivalents such as the UK GDPR, Brazil's LGPD, California's CCPA/CPRA, or similar regional frameworks.

What Article 15 gives you

A properly filed Article 15 request compels Lifesum to provide a copy of your personal data in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format — typically JSON, CSV, or a zipped bundle of both. This data should include your food diary entries, weight history, exercise entries, water logs, custom foods, custom recipes, account metadata, and any other records tied to your account. It should also include the purposes of processing, the recipients or categories of recipients of the data, and the retention periods.

Lifesum has one calendar month to respond to a valid DSAR. The deadline can be extended by two further months for complex requests, but the controller must inform you of the extension within the first month. The response must be free of charge for a first request.

How to send the request

Email Lifesum's privacy team — the address is published in their privacy policy and is typically privacy@lifesum.com or a similarly named inbox. Keep the message short, specific, and clearly invoking Article 15. Use a template along these lines:

Subject: Data Subject Access Request under GDPR Article 15

Dear Lifesum Privacy Team,

I am writing to exercise my right of access under Article 15 of the General Data Protection Regulation.

I request a complete copy of all personal data you hold about me, including but not limited to: food diary entries, weight entries, exercise entries, water intake logs, custom foods, custom recipes, barcode scan history, goal settings, account metadata, device identifiers, and any derived profiles or inferences.

Please provide the data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format (CSV or JSON). Please also confirm the purposes of processing, the categories of recipients, the retention period, and the source of any data not collected directly from me.

My account email is: [your account email] My account username (if different): [your username] Date of account creation (approximate): [month and year]

I expect your response within one calendar month, as required by Article 12(3).

Kind regards, [Your full name]

Send the email from the address associated with your Lifesum account. This simplifies identity verification and speeds up the response. If Lifesum asks for additional identity documents, ask them to justify the request under Article 12(6), which requires that identity checks be proportionate.

Timeline and what to expect

Most users receive an acknowledgement within a few days and the full data package within two to three weeks. The response is typically delivered as a password-protected ZIP file containing one or more JSON or CSV files. The structure is not always friendly — fields may be named after internal database columns — but the data is there and it is yours.

If the deadline passes without a meaningful response, you can escalate to your national data protection authority. In Sweden this is the Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten, known as IMY. In other EU states, your local DPA is the appropriate destination. UK users can escalate to the ICO. Escalation is rarely needed because most mature app companies respond within the window, but the option exists and regulators do follow up.

This is a process, not legal advice. If your request involves unusually complex circumstances, speak to a qualified data protection professional.

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Manual Workarounds

The GDPR bundle gives you raw data. That data may not be pretty, and some pieces — particularly your recipes and custom foods — may be easier to rescue manually from the app before you cancel. The following workarounds complement the DSAR and are worth doing in parallel, not as a replacement.

Screenshot your food diary

Open Lifesum and scroll back through your food diary for the periods that matter to you. Take screenshots of the daily summary screens — the ones showing the date, total calories, macro breakdown, and individual food entries. Screenshot the weekly or monthly views if the app still offers them on your plan.

Screenshots are not importable, but they are unambiguous human records. If you are tracking progress for a coach, a doctor, or your own motivation, a folder of dated screenshots is a durable archive. Name the files with ISO dates — for example, 2026-04-19-lifesum-diary.png — so they sort chronologically across platforms.

Bridge weights through HealthKit or Health Connect

Weight history is the single most important record for most users, and it is also the easiest to rescue. If you have ever connected Lifesum to Apple Health or Google Health Connect, every weight entry Lifesum wrote to that platform is still there.

On iPhone, open the Apple Health app, go to Browse → Body Measurements → Weight, and review the full history. Tap Show All Data to see every entry with its source. Data written by Lifesum will be tagged accordingly. You can export the entire Apple Health archive through Profile → Export All Health Data, which produces a ZIP containing an XML file with every weight entry ever recorded, regardless of the source app.

On Android, open Health Connect, go to Data and access → Weight, and review the history in the same way. Health Connect also supports exporting data for import into other apps that connect to the platform.

If Lifesum was never linked to Apple Health or Health Connect during your use, this bridge will not work and your weights will only arrive through the DSAR response. This is a good argument for linking nutrition apps to the OS-level health platform from day one — it gives you a permanent off-app copy of your most sensitive metrics.

Recreate recipes in a spreadsheet

Custom recipes are the quiet tragedy of app migrations. Every recipe you built up over years — your protein pancakes, your partner's chili, your go-to oat bowl — lives as a structured object inside Lifesum with ingredients and portions. The GDPR export typically includes these as JSON, but the JSON is not trivially importable into another app because every tracker uses its own internal food IDs and its own database schema.

The pragmatic workaround is a spreadsheet. Open a Google Sheet or Excel workbook, and create a tab per recipe. List the ingredients, quantities, and any preparation notes you want to keep. You now have a portable cookbook that you can re-enter into any tracker, share with a coach, or print.

This is tedious if you have fifty recipes. It is worth it for the twenty you actually use. Lifesum's DSAR JSON, combined with your spreadsheet, is the most durable record of your recipe history you can build.

Capture barcode and custom food entries

If you added custom foods or scanned unusual barcodes, those entries are also in the DSAR export. For a faster manual rescue, scroll the My Foods or Custom Foods section inside Lifesum and screenshot each entry. If you have fewer than thirty custom items, this is often quicker than parsing JSON later.

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Where to Import to Next

Once your data is out, the question becomes where it goes in. None of the major nutrition trackers, including Nutrola, currently offers a native "import from Lifesum" button. A genuinely native Lifesum importer would require schema parity that no public API exists for. What each app does offer is a workable entry path.

Nutrola (manual onboarding)

Nutrola does not advertise a Lifesum importer, and this guide will not claim one. What Nutrola does offer is a fast onboarding flow designed to get a new tracker up and running quickly from scratch or from manually re-entered data. Use the AI photo, voice, and barcode logging to rebuild your habit base without copying entries one by one. Enter your goal, your current weight, your target weight, and let the engine set your calorie and macro targets.

For historical weights, import the Apple Health or Health Connect archive — Nutrola reads from both and will surface your full weight history once the sync completes. For recipes, use your spreadsheet as the source and either paste each recipe URL where applicable, or build custom meals inside the app using the verified 1.8M+ entry database.

Full disclosure on what Nutrola is not doing here: it is not automatically ingesting a Lifesum JSON file and reconstructing your diary day-by-day. That capability does not exist at the database level because Lifesum's internal food IDs are not public. What Nutrola does is make starting over fast enough that reconstruction often is not needed.

MyFitnessPal (CSV via community tools)

MyFitnessPal supports CSV-style import through its web interface and several community tools. If your DSAR export contains a food diary CSV, you can map its columns to MyFitnessPal's expected format and upload in batches. This is more work than it sounds, because MyFitnessPal's food matching happens per-row and crowdsourced food names rarely match Lifesum's names exactly. Expect a lot of manual fix-ups.

MyFitnessPal also reads weight history from Apple Health and Google Health Connect, so the weight bridge described earlier works here too.

Cronometer (CSV import)

Cronometer has the most mature CSV import among the mainstream trackers. The web version lets you upload a CSV with columns for date, food name, amount, and unit. If you map your Lifesum DSAR CSV to Cronometer's format, you can reconstruct a historical diary — though the foods will match Cronometer's verified database, which means some entries will need manual confirmation where the names do not line up.

Cronometer's verified database is a strong fit for users who came to Lifesum for accuracy and found the crowdsourced items frustrating.

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How Nutrola Handles Post-Migration Onboarding

For users moving from Lifesum specifically, Nutrola's onboarding is designed to minimize the "new app" friction that usually derails migrations in the first week. Here is what the flow looks like once you have your DSAR data or your manual rescues in hand:

• Goal-first setup: Start with your goal — lose, maintain, gain, or recomposition. Enter your current and target weight. Nutrola sets calorie and macro targets automatically and shows the math so you can adjust if you had different numbers in Lifesum.
• HealthKit or Health Connect import: Link to Apple Health or Google Health Connect. Your full historical weight log appears inside Nutrola within minutes, even though the entries originated in Lifesum.
• AI photo logging from day one: Point the camera at a meal. Nutrola identifies foods and portions in under three seconds and writes a verified entry, so you start building habit momentum immediately.
• Voice logging for quick entries: Say what you ate. The natural-language parser handles phrases like "a bowl of oats with blueberries and a flat white" and writes a structured log.
• Barcode scanning against a verified database: The 1.8M+ entry database is reviewed rather than crowdsourced, which means fewer wildly wrong entries than the Lifesum database showed for niche products.
• Custom recipe rebuild from your spreadsheet: Use the recipe builder to re-enter the spreadsheet recipes you rescued. Each recipe stores ingredients, portions, and a verified nutrient breakdown across 100+ nutrients.
• Recipe URL paste: For recipes you found online rather than built yourself, paste the URL and let Nutrola extract the ingredients and portions automatically.
• 100+ nutrients tracked by default: Calories and macros are the start. Nutrola also tracks vitamins, minerals, fiber, sodium, added sugar, and more — useful if part of your reason for leaving Lifesum was nutrient depth.
• Free tier and €2.50/month plan: Start on the free tier to validate the migration. If the workflow clicks, the paid plan is €2.50/month — often materially cheaper than Lifesum Premium, with no ads on any tier.
• 14 languages: Full localization for the European user base that Lifesum cultivated, so you do not lose your language when you change app.
• Zero ads across every tier: No interstitials, no banner ads, no upsell prompts during meal entry — the interface stays clean whether you are on the free plan or the paid plan.
• One subscription across devices: iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Android under a single account. No separate charges for the tablet or the watch surface.

The point of this flow is to stop treating migration as a data problem and start treating it as a habit problem. The DSAR gives you an archive. The manual workarounds give you a spreadsheet. Nutrola's onboarding gives you a tracker you actually want to open tomorrow morning.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Can I export my full Lifesum food diary directly inside the app?

No. Lifesum's in-app export is a summary PDF, not a structured food log. To get your complete food diary with timestamps and individual entries, file a GDPR Article 15 Data Subject Access Request with Lifesum's privacy team. They are required to respond within one calendar month with a machine-readable copy of your personal data.

How long does a Lifesum DSAR take to arrive?

Most users receive their full data package within two to three weeks of filing. The legal deadline under GDPR is one calendar month, extendable by two months for complex requests if Lifesum notifies you within the first month. An acknowledgement email usually arrives within a few days of the original request.

What format will my Lifesum DSAR data be in?

Typically a password-protected ZIP containing JSON or CSV files — sometimes both. Field names often reflect internal database columns rather than friendly labels, so opening the files in a spreadsheet app and reviewing the headers is the first step before doing anything with the data.

Does Nutrola have a native Lifesum importer?

No, and this guide will not claim one. No mainstream tracker has a native Lifesum importer because Lifesum's internal food IDs are not exposed through a public API. Nutrola's answer is a fast onboarding flow with AI photo, voice, and barcode logging plus HealthKit or Health Connect import for weight history, which often makes reconstruction unnecessary.

Can I keep my weight history when I leave Lifesum?

Yes, if you ever linked Lifesum to Apple Health or Google Health Connect. Every weight entry Lifesum wrote to the OS-level health platform is still there and survives the app uninstall. Nutrola, MyFitnessPal, and Cronometer all read from these platforms, so your weight history follows you automatically.

What happens to my Lifesum data after I cancel my subscription?

Cancelling a paid subscription typically downgrades the account rather than deleting data. To permanently delete your data, you must submit an erasure request under GDPR Article 17 — a separate process from cancellation. File your access request first, verify you have everything you want, then request deletion.

Is filing a GDPR request complicated or risky?

No. It is a standard email sent to the privacy team, invoking Article 15, with your account email. Lifesum is legally obliged to respond, and the process is free. The template in this guide is a starting point, and most users can send the request in under five minutes.

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Final Verdict

Lifesum's official export is a summary PDF, which is not enough if you want to actually move your history somewhere else. The full data path is a GDPR Article 15 Data Subject Access Request, which is free, legally enforceable, and typically answered within three weeks. Layer in the manual workarounds — diary screenshots, a HealthKit or Health Connect weight bridge, and a recipe spreadsheet — and you will have a complete archive of your Lifesum years before you cancel.

Where you import to next depends on what you want. MyFitnessPal and Cronometer both support CSV import if you are willing to map columns and fix matches. Nutrola does not claim a native Lifesum importer, and this guide will not invent one — but the combination of a free tier, €2.50/month paid plan, 1.8M+ verified entries, AI photo logging under three seconds, voice NLP, 100+ nutrients, 14 languages, and zero ads across every tier makes the "start fresh but fast" path genuinely painless. File the DSAR today, rescue your recipes this weekend, and decide next week which tracker deserves the next decade of your data.