I feel like you should all know that this isn’t a New Year’s Resolution. My doctor straight up told me I don’t get enough protein throughout my day and recommended I use MyFitnessPal, an app that tracks your diet and exercise by measuring your caloric intake while setting goals along the way. So obviously I did, because I’m a good kid and I listen to my hot doctor.
It’s basically like Weight Watchers but instead of a point system, you just count calories. Or rather, it counts them for you. Why MyFitnessPal? Here are the pros and cons:
Pros:
1. It’s free. You can’t compete with free.
2. You can scan the barcode of whatever you’re consuming instead of searching for it within the app. This function is so useful! No, I didn’t want to type in all this information, thank you for making this easy for me. Also, it is kind of fun to scan stuff.
3. The lay out of the IOS app is really cute. The plus sign at the bottom that allows you to navigate anywhere is so well made. It’s also really nice to swipe from day to day and compare your stats. Love it!
4. The app isn’t very hard to use. It’s well designed and the system itself works.
5. The pie chart with your daily carbohydrate, fat, and protein intake is really helpful (especially for my needs). It tells you what percentage of each you’ve consumed that day, and what your goal for the day was. It’s super easy to compare.
Cons:
1. Though MyFitnessPal will take into account that you’ve done some type of cardiovascular exercise, and will give you extra calories for the day based on that, they won’t do the same for strength training. This is because they can’t possibly know how much you burnt; they don’t know how many breaks you might have taken between sets, how much you lifted, whether you pushed yourself or not, and many other factors.
2. Like I mentioned before, it’s fun to scan things. It’s also great that this app knows the caloric value of products at places like Starbucks. Here’s the biggest issue I’m having: if I make a meal from scratch, it’s a real pain in the butt to enter all the information into the logging system. I have to add in every single ingredient individually and then divide it into the portions that I’m actually eating. It takes for-freaking-ever.
3. Lastly, this takes so long to do. I literally have to cut time out of my day before/after every meal to get all this information poured in. I may be a touch lazy, but I’m not about all this inefficiency.
In conclusion, this is a pretty good app if you need to see what your eating habits really mean and the direction you need to be moving in. That being said, I don’t think I’ll be using it long term. If you’ve used MyFitnessPal, comment below and let us know what you think!
References:
1, 2, 3, 4 & 5
http://www.femalefitnessmotivation.me/page/3/
https://lh6.ggpht.com/N5hg8QsOWPNoKao1ccc9aBCOHVinwY03hRldne6AfVUBQZCBmHZDxYm6sHd9g-BS8n4=w300
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