"I have the secret to losing weight: Consume fewer calories than you expend." That's a bit of an old joke, and while the punchline is true, it's easier said than done. We live in a world of stress, temptation, cheap pleasures, and convenience—all of which can affect our diet and health. Losing weight (or gaining or maintaining weight) isn't really just a matter of math, although if you can incorporate the math easily enough, it can give you a leg up. MyFitnessPal [1] is a website that gives you a wealth of tools for doing the math required for managing your weight, and the companion iPhone app [2] (free) by the same name is even better (there are apps for Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry [3] , too). The MyFitnessPal iPhone app couldn't be easier or quicker to use, and that's what sets it apart from the pack of other calorie-counting apps in the App Store and makes it our Editors' Choice.
Unlike other popular fitness apps, such as Lose It! and Calorie Tracker by Livestrong.com, MyFitnessPal doesn't have you needlessly jumping from screen to screen every time you log a food you've eaten, beverage you've consumed, or exercise you've completed. That little bit of optimization in usability—keeping you on the screen you need to see, or returning you to it automatically—goes a long way over time, so you can keep moving rather than sit still, inputting data.
How it Works
MyFitnessPal is a calorie counter and exercise tracker. It's not a complete weight loss program with deep nutritional recommendations, tips, or advice. At this point in time, it's pretty well impossible to get safe and accurate information to that degree for your body in the context of your life from a machine alone. You really need a trained professional for step-by-step instruction and help.
What an app can do, however, is help you figure out how many calories you're eating versus how many you're burning. Apps can also help you track and watch over time changes, like your weight or waist size. MyFitnessPal does all these things very well, especially if you open it up and make use of it several times a day, every day. To work correctly, you have to be diligent about logging everything you eat and drink, and all the exercise you get. Like any diet and health program, you have to do the work. The tools are there to help you do the work, but the onus is on you.
Get Ready to Lose, Gain, or Maintain Weight
Some apps have user profiles that are optional, but MyFitnessPal can only work if you tell it a whole lot about yourself, including your age, height, gender, weight, and general level of activity. For activity, MyFitnessPal provides very good descriptions of the several options it has, helping point you toward the right one. For example, anyone with a desk job should select Sedentary, even if they are very active outside work. Cardiovascular activities are logged separately; the activity setting just helps the app establish a baseline for how many calories you burn if you don't do anything else.
Another part of the set up process—and perhaps the part most users are eager to reach—is setting a goal. You can choose to gain, lose, or maintain weight, but the app restricts you from trying to lose more than two pounds (a little less than one kilo) per week. Once you've set your goal, the app calculates a target number of calories you should net in a day. The "net" is not the same as the total number of calories you should consume. Consumption will change based on how much exercise you do, but the net will remain the same as long as your goal and profile information stay the same. MyFitnessPal always displays these numbers with clear labels so you're never left guessing what they mean.
Day-to-Day Fitness Tracking
One of the main functions of MyFitnessPal is to count calories. The diary is the place where you record what you eat and the cardiovascular and weight-training exercises you complete. The app lets you categorize food into meals: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Exercise only has two categories: cardiovascular and strength (weight-training). Optionally, you can track how much water you drink, too, as well as keep notes in a freeform text field for food and exercise.
Entering foods and activities into the diary is dead simple. Other apps bounce you from one screen to another when logging foods, and MyFitnessPal seems to streamline this process better than other apps. From the "add" page, you can select the meal or type of exercise. A new page opens where you can find the item you want. For food and drink, you can search or scroll through frequent, recent, My Foods, meals, and recipes. All these pages work despite whether you're connected to the Internet, another reason this app works so much better than others of its kind. MyFitnessPal also gives you much more granularity than Livestrong.com's app when entering how much food or drink you consumed—eighths, quarters, two-thirds, etc. for MyFitnessPal versus multiples of quarters only.
The food catalog that MyFitnessPal pulls from is outstanding, with brand-name foods from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., restaurant dishes, even recipes from leading cooking and fitness magazines. Most food apps use a database maintained by the USDA [4] , which includes not only fresh foods, but also chain restaurant food and thousands of packaged items—but MyFitnessPal 's catalog is so much better than other apps' because it includes recipes, meals, and foods that other users have upload. Any user can share a recipe that she or he has created, although only from the website (not from the app), and only when the user specifically chooses to do so—the default is always to keep the information private. But a lot of people do share their recipes and food items, and it's a huge part of what makes MyFitnessPal so great. You can't see who uploaded the information, only the food name and nutritional information about it.
Links
- ^ MyFitnessPal (www.myfitnesspal.com)
- ^ companion iPhone app (itunes.apple.com)
- ^ apps for Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry (www.myfitnesspal.com)
- ^ a database maintained by the USDA (www.nal.usda.gov)
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