My Fitness Pal
“I want to get fit…starting Monday” said everyone at some point in their lives. I say this more or less every week but during the school year, my education, work, and sleep always take priority of things like cooking real food and going to the gym, which is why I thought I would take this week’s module as the perfect opportunity to start some healthy habits. I am a longtime user of Under Armour’s athletics app called My Fitness Pal which tracks all the nitty gritty details of the food you consume, water intake, exercise, and more if you pay for the premium version (I don’t so I won’t talk anymore about that). I decided to keep a daily log for further encouragement but spoiler alert, I got strep throat and that didn’t happen.
However, like I said, I am a longtime off and on user so I’ll break down the app’s basic functions and settings, and show examples of my past logs.
So, to get started, here is a screenshot of the My Fitness Pal homepage:
The top bar tracks your calories for the day. The app establishes how many you should be consuming every day when you first create an account by asking things like your age, weight, activity level, and your personal goals such as lose x amount of weight in y amount of time. This bar is my main purpose for using the app as I tend to not eat enough, and it is convenient to check throughout the day as it is the first thing you see when opening the app. Under that bar are posts from the app-usually health articles and recipes-and any posts that your friends on the app share. This feature allows people to encourage one another by posting milestones, creating statuses, and sharing articles. Members can like and comment on these posts as well.
Next up is your diary. This is where you can find a detailed log of all your activity, going back the entire time you have had your account-so if you delete it, it will still be there when you reinstall it. Here is an example of what it looks like:
The first page is today’s date, and again features the calories remaining bar. It then goes and breaks down all of the food you’ve added, as well as exercise and water. Adding food to the log is really simple, and there are a couple of ways to do it. First, the app will scan the bar code of the food you want to add, and all of the nutritional information will pop up. If that doesn’t work (which it almost always does) you can search for the item to see if other users have manually added the food. Once you find it, just click it and again, all the info is there. If that fails as well, you can manually add the nutritional information yourself. My Fitness Pal also stores all of the food you have added so you’ll only ever have to search for a product once. Another bonus is if you are lazy like me and eat the same breakfast every day, you can simply swipe the desired meal bar to add the previous day’s meal. It’s overall incredibly convenient.
Your diary also tracks what you eat in a few different ways:
The first shows when you consume your calories. I find this really helpful as I usually eat most of mine at night, so it is easier to pin point when you need to be eating. The next page shows you a breakdown of all your nutrients. Back when the account gives you a calorie goal, they also give you specific nutrient goals since everyone is different and requires different things. The final page is your macros-a graph demonstrating a balance between your three basic food types of carbs, fats, and protein. It again shows you your goal percentage, and your actual percentage. All of this is really useful and personalized to fit how anyone may want to use the app. You may notice the “Export” button on these photos, and that is an option for premium members to be emailed a link to download their logs. I don’t really find this necessary since the app stores them for you, but if your phone was running low on storage space, it might be nice to move them to a laptop or USB.
Other features of My Fitness Pal include creating challenges to complete with friends, tracking your sleep schedule, and creating personalized workouts. My only critique is that when you add a workout to your log, the app doesn’t always tell you how many calories you have burned so I often found myself figuring it out myself until I eventually just gave up on that feature.
My Fitness Pal also offers lots of personalization to their settings as well. The goals that you set for yourself can be general like simple weight loss or gain, or can be as specific as how many calories/nutrients you are eating each meal. You can also change your weight and activity levels at any time, but the app also gets you to do this whenever a goal period has ended. Extensive privacy settings allow you to keep your profile private, and choose what your friends see when they look at your profile. You can even turn off the ability for people to search you at all and add a password login to your account. Finally, app notifications are customizable, as are email newsletter subscriptions.
All in all, I would say that My Fitness Pal is an incredible app to track your health habits. It is so customized that I find it hard to see why anyone wouldn’t find it useful, and it is so convenient to navigate, even the laziest of people can maintain their diaries. Setting reminders to workout or eat a meal is helpful if you’re a busy student or worker and the option to share your progress and complete challenges with friends is really encouraging. The app is also interoperable with Facebook, and downloading information to any device if you are a premium member. I highly recommend this technology to anyone who would like to track their health habits.
