Apr
04
2012Â
Let’s be honest, most of us have to work very hard at maintaining a healthy body weight and nutritious diet. As busy moms to young kids, time for ‘us’ is at the bottom of the to-do-list, therefore it becomes a fact that any weight loss approach has to be easy and enjoyable in order to be attainable.
I have personally tried many programs and methods and while I’ve enjoyed most of them, I often ‘fall off the wagon’ because I can’t maintain the lifestyle. This happens for various reasons but mainly it’s due to lack of time and money that I can’t stay committed.
Weight loss comes down to a simple equation; calories in vs. calories out. This means that as long as we are eating healthy and staying fairly active, we are able to maintain a healthy body weight and sense of wellbeing.
MY FITNESS PAL
This is all well and good but monitoring the calories we’re eating and the ones we’re burning can be time-consuming and difficult to track. That’s why I have fallen in love with a handy little iPhone app called MyFitnessPal. This calorie and activity counter is also an online tool and guess what? It’s free!
I don’t know why it’s free because honestly, I would pay for it (shh! Don’t tell them I said that) since it’s so effective. As I’m on the go a lot I tend to favour the iPhone app over the web version. Here are a few of my favourite features:
It does the calculations for you:  your calories burned through activity are subtracted from the calories consumed you throughout the day to provide a net daily number so you are always aware of how many calories you’ve got left.
Food is tracked in a diary format: this allows you to monitor your eating habits and look for areas of improvement, repeat favourite snacks and meals and edit entries easily.
Save your favourite recipes: we all have our favourite, go-to meals that we’ll repeat again and again. Enter it once in the Recipes section and reuse it over and over. This takes the guess-work out of weekday meals!
Search for thousands of foods: I have been using this app for a long time and I have never run into a situation where I wasn’t able to find the food I was looking for.  And if that case ever comes up, it’s easy to add in your own food.
Scan your labels: one of the newer features of MyFitnessPal is the built-in ability to scan bar codes of your favourite foods. I’ve used label apps before and I’ve never had success with the food coming up. Today I scanned two different foods and to my delight, they both popped of immediately. It automatically adds all the nutritional value and calorie count. Talk about time-saving!
Track your exercise: just as you can search and log your food, you can also track your exercise by choosing from hundreds of activities already entered and estimated for calorie burn. Again, if you don’t find your particular activity, you can enter your own. As mentioned above, your calories burned are added to your daily log and included in our daily total.
Get social: we all love social media and sharing our life events for all to see. You can do so with MyFitnessPal by adding friends and following their progress, motivating them and seeing their achievements. You even get updates when a friend hasn’t logged on in a while and you can send them a message to encourage them.
MORE FEATURES
Among these features mentioned you can also access charts logging your progress, set reminders, watch tutorials, edit your profile to reflect your current statistics and set your weight loss goals.
You can sign up for a free MyFitnessPal account and access even more features at www.myfitnesspal.com [1] and download the free iPhone app here [2] or iPad app here [3] .
If you do end up joining feel free to add me to your community. After all there is strength in numbers. You can find me under citymom.
Until then, good luck with your weight loss goals!
Links
- ^ www.myfitnesspal.com (www.myfitnesspal.com)
- ^ here (www.myfitnesspal.com)
- ^ here (www.myfitnesspal.com)
- ^ Image: stockimages / FreeDigitalPhotos.net (www.freedigitalphotos.net)
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