Health
The Number ONE Health App You Don’t Have.
How MyFitnessPal changes lives.
You clicked on this article because you are presumably unhappy with how your body looks. Statistically speaking, it is, therefore, safe for me to assume that it is because you feel too fat. But you aren’t alone with your unhappiness. Hundreds of millions of people all around the world feel the same. No wonder therefore that a lot of different companies have tried to tap into this market. One of them is the company behind MyFitnessPal. Speaking from my personal experience in the past, I can confidently say that they have come up with the ONE solution for people like you.
Okay, this sounds pretty cocky to claim, however, you will understand me and share my view on this topic if you give me the next three minutes of your life and spend them reading this article.
Disclaimer:
I am not paid to write about the app like this in any way. I just truly love it.
Personally speaking, I love MyFitnessPal. You probably realized this by now. It’s a great app. I will explain this further to you in the next few minutes, however, we will need to start with something different first. Before getting back to the app, let me get you covered with the basics behind the whole weight loss topic first.
Lifestyle change vs holiday challenge
Searching for the typical dieter’s dream diet brings up millions of results on Google. As you can see by that, doing a diet to lose weight has become pretty much mainstream by now. The problem with dieting, however, is that it fails to address one fundamental problem most people in need of a diet have. This deeper and more important problem is of such tremendous importance that it has the power to destroy all the improvements a diet can bring you.
This problem is the general unhealthy way of eating most people follow. After all, there is also a reason why they need a diet in the first place. This unhealthy way of eating is a lifestyle choice. A lifestyle choice that results in an unhealthy weight and an unattractive appearance (to the average person).
If you compare dieting and the way you eat on a day-to-day basis side by side, then you will see that having a bad way of eating in your day-to-day life will have a much greater impact on your body weight than just dieting for a few weeks. Most people, however, don’t get this. They think that diets will make them look better. This is why they do diets and limit the way they eat. Besides the fact that (statistically speaking) most people end up quitting their diet before they are done anyway, even if they should be successful they are almost guaranteed to pick up weight in the future again.
This is called the Jojo effect and is feared by all dieters. They don’t realize that the Jojo effect is a natural consequence of how they go about trying to lose weight. In the end, diets will only help you lose weight for a short time only, but if you begin to follow an unhealthy lifestyle afterward again, that has you pick up a pound each month then you will also be gaining weight after your diet is over.
All this is the reason why to lose weight you don’t need to diet. What you need instead is a healthy way of eating.
Where MyFitnessPal helps you
What is a “healthy way of eating”?
This question must be answered for each person individually. That’s because, besides general tips and guidelines like having balanced nutrition, every person is highly individual. How many calories you can eat each day without gaining weight, therefore, becomes the most important thing to know if you want to lose weight. It can depend on a lot of different factors. Just to let me name a few for example your height, age, and activity level all affect this very important number.
Reading this might cause you to think that it must therefore be impossible to know how many calories you can eat each day without gaining weight unless you are some kind of doctor. But this assumption is all wrong. Through the help of technology, this becomes very easy.
MyFitnessPal is this kind of technology. It’s an easy-to-use calorie tracking app that runs on both Android and IOS. The app by itself is free. Of course, they want to make money with it somehow, so they also offer some advanced features you can only use if you pay for them, but personally speaking, the free version is more than enough, to begin with eating healthy.
The app tackles the exact problem I just explained to you. Instead of enforcing some temporary lifestyle changes on you, it helps you to apply long-term improvements to your nutrition. It is also very easy to use. After giving the app some information about yourself, it calculates how many calories you can consume each day without losing or gaining weight. Then you will track everything you eat by easily scanning its barcode with your cell phone’s camera. MyFitnessPal will automatically add the information from your scanned food to the list of foods you consumed the day and at every point in time, you know how much you can still eat.
The greatest benefit of this approach
For me, the greatest benefit to this approach is that you can still eat snacks sometimes. As long as you scan them with the app you could theoretically eat snacks all day long as you stop eating at all as soon as you have reached your daily calorie maximum.
This article is supposed to teach you one thing. That is:
Changing the way you eat for a short time only will get you nowhere because in the long term you will always fall back on your old habits.
Knowing that you learned that you, therefore, don’t need diets and instead should focus on changing what you eat daily. To apply this lesson to your life and finally get that dream body of yours, that you deserve, I introduced you to the calorie tracking app MyFitnessPal.
This is all I can do. If you want to see a change in your life, it is now up to you to apply what you learned. Download MyFitnessPal and start tracking your calories, you will learn a lot about yourself and start seeing results immediately (presumably at least in the first two weeks).
By the way, I have also written another article on this topic, in which I teach you how to make the whole process of tracking calories easier for you. You can check it here if you want to:
Do yourself a favor and don’t just hope for change, act to bring change to your life.