MyFitnessPal App Product Review

Considering MyFitnessPal is a free Android app (I am technologically illiterate enough not to know whether it is available for the iphone), I suppose this isn’t so much a product review in the sense of making sure you understand what you are paying for – it is more of a recommendation.

My boyfriend and I have both been using the MyFitnessPal app for about a week now.

Cons:

1. You have to remember to use it
Since I tend to obsess to an unhealthy degree about everything that I put in my mouth, I am constantly looking up how many calories various foods contain and planning my meals around that. My boyfriend… not so much. A few times a day he goes, “Oh, yeah…” when he sees me pull up this app, and quickly whips out his phone and tries to remember what and how much he has eaten that day. This tends to lead to things like “oh, I think it was about a cup… right?” That’s fine if you want a ballpark figure like he does, but for statistical nuts like me, the inaccuracy would drive me crazy.

2. Odd calorie differences
When you search for foods, the results often have a pretty big range of possible calories. This makes sense – the same dish cooked by a restaurant could be vastly different than your homemade version. The problem occurs when you didn’t exactly measure out ingredients, or the particular restaurant you ate at doesn’t have the dish listed. That ends up leaving me thinking things like, was that cup of vegetable lo mein 300 calories, or was it more like 500? When in doubt, I try to pick a choice close to the upper end of the range, just in case. I am sure I estimate low sometimes, but I figure it is probably evened out by the times I guess high, so in the end it shouldn’t matter too terribly much.

3. Some missing nutritional info
Every single food listing in the entire app has a calorie amount, so for pure calorie counters this app is golden. However, if you are tracking macronutrient ratios and charting your sodium, vitamins, etc., you will probably encounter some foods that do not have that information listed. If you are concerned about this, you may have to do some additional digging online and create a custom food listing for future use – from then on, every time you eat that food it will accurately track all of the nutrition info that is important to you.

4. Needs cell / internet signal
To look up foods in the database and synchronize the additions to your account, you must be connected to the internet through either your cell signal or WiFi. If you eat picnics deep in the woods or have lunch in basements a lot, you will have to remember what you ate until you get to a place where you have a signal and can add your foods.

Pros:

1. Awesome food database
I have never looked up a food and not found at least a few listings. I have even found homemade, oddball items like blueberry cream cheese pie, chocolate covered bananas, etc. As mentioned above, some times you have to make a guess about which listing to use for the greatest calorie accuracy, but that gets much easier once you get used to it.

2. Super intuitive and easy to use
I pretty much immediately knew how to use everything upon opening the app for the first time. The navigation and layout is intuitive and simple, but still manages to be very informative.

3. Have not had any problems with the app crashing – a rarity for me.
I have yet to see any errors or crashes with this app. This will probably jinx it for me.

4. Counts exercise as well
If you do some exercise, you can look that up in the app’s exercise database, and it will add the calories you have burned back onto your total goal. This is handy for me – I tend to eat way too much for lunch and then realize that, in order to have enough of a calorie allowance for dinner, I need to go get some exercise! In that way, it is an excellent exercise motivator.

5. Remembers your frequently eaten items
If you are the type of person that routinely reaches for the same foods every day or a few times a week, this app will keep track of your frequently eaten foods and suggest them for you so you don’t have to look them up every time.

6. Lets you create and store custom meals and custom foods
Let’s say, for some reason, you are a huge fan of eating badger’s brains. (So sorry, I just watched a Taboo episode where some guy eats roadkill badger brain.) I have not personally looked this up in the database, but I am willing to bet if I did I wouldn’t find it listed there. Lucky for you, if you happen to know or can figure out the calorie content of your badger’s brains, you can create a custom food that the app will remember for you, sparing you the hassle of looking up the nutritional info every time you have a badger brain craving.

The app takes this one step further. Say that every time you eat your badger’s brains, you have it with ketchup, a baked potato, and a side salad. You can store this entire meal as one unit so you don’t have to remember to add all of the individual parts every time you eat it. This is an excellent time saver.

7. Synchronizes your account with the website accessible from your computer
In order to use the app, you have to sign up for a MyFitnessPal account. Every time you update anything, your account will synchronize so that you can switch from your phone during the day to your computer in the evening if you wish and still have the same information available. I haven’t really made use of the website yet, but I hear it has some additional handy functionality that the app does not offer.

8. Automatically decides your optimal caloric intake for you
When you set up the app for the first time, it asks you for things like your weight, height, gender, birth date, activity level, etc. It also asks you your goal weight and how quickly you would like to gain or lose that weight. For instance, I set my current weight at 184, my goal weight at 160 (until further notice) and chose the option to lose one pound per week (it goes higher, but I am a fan of the slow and steady process). It then takes all that information and generates a calorie limit for you that should, with individual variation of course, help you reach your goal. I think mine was somewhere in the vicinity of 1590 calories per day (I chose the sedentary activity level figuring that was my baseline when I am not doing Insanity).

9. Also lets you customize your own calorie goals if you disagree with theirs
I like nice, easy to remember numbers. After I got my estimate of how much I should be eating per day, I went into my profile and edited my daily calorie limit to 1500 instead. Easy as pie. Yumm, pie…

10. Calculates an estimate of what you will weigh in the future
This is one of my favorite features about this app. At the end of the day, when you have added all of the foods and exercise and everything is totaled up, you can hit a button and it will calculate an estimate for you, based on your numbers for that day, what your weight will be five weeks from now. If I have a crappy day, I can hit the button and realize “oh no, if I keep eating like this I am going to gain weight!” On the other hand, it is awesome to have a good day and hit that button and be told that, if every day were like that day, I would lose five pounds in the next five weeks. It’s one of the best ways I have seen of providing feedback on how well you have eaten for one particular day – it hits home a lot harder than “oh well, I went a few calories over my limit, what’s the harm in that?”

Overall, I would say this is really a pretty solid little weight loss app. Over the past week, my experiences with it have been largely favorable. Quite aside from its straightforward functionality, I also really like it because it somewhat helps me control my binge eating.

Before, when I would binge, I played so many mental games with myself about how many calories the food “probably” was and that “well, a little bit won’t hurt – so why should a little bit more?” This way, I have direct accountability – “well, that half a pie I just ate had 1200 calories. I will DEFINITELY remember that next time…” It’s quite eye-opening.

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