MyFitnessPal nutrition and fitness tracking app - a review

by Kathryn Weihen | Monday, October 10, 2011

Recently I became aware of a new fitness and nutrition website called MyFitnessPal.com. The site is basically a free tool that allows people to track their fitness activities and nutritional intake. The idea behind it is that by holding people accountable to what they do and don't do it will make it easier for them to achieve their fitness and health goals.

Functionality.
The site is fairly simple to operate with a range of fitness activities to select from before entering in your weight and duration of the activity in order to calculate the calories expended. For your nutritional intake, you can select from a range of foods in their database. For example subway 6-inch turkey on wheat with tomato, cucumber and lettuce or Thai restaurant chicken cashew nut stir-fry or even just Arnott’s Vita Wheats. You can also choose to create your own recipes to add. For example a homemade soup or muesli, stir fry, sandwich for lunch, or any other meal that you have created yourself. These recipes are saved under a recipes tab for easy access if consumed again.

Calculating the calories is done simply by selecting the amount from the drop down options and adding in the servings that you consumed. When adding in your meals, there is also the quick tools option which allows you to copy a meal from the previous day or date if consumed again.
Each item of food logged calculates and shows the amount of calories, carbohydrates, fats and protein with a daily total of each calculated for you to consult.

The site also has BMI and BMR calculators to calculate yourdaily intake of calories and shows how many total calories, carbohydrates, fats and proteins are remaining as you log in your meals and snacks for the day. There is also a phone app which allows access at anytime and syncs to your web profile automatically and vice versa.

As far as exercise is concerned, while I was navigating my way around the site and the selection of exercise activities I noticed the only options for boxing were in the ring, sparring and bag work. What about a boxing class? There is a circuit training option however but I guess it depends on what sort of class you are participating in. Under the stationary bike activity option, your selections were general, very light, light, moderate and so on. For running, the options were in mph from5mph to 10mph. Once you have selected your exercise activity, you then log in the duration for calorie calculation.

The resistance training section has an enormous database of exercises to select from, so adding in your resistance training program should be possible, but perhaps a bit time consuming at first. However I did not find options for strength classes like BodyPump or anything else.

Despite the time required to find and record your nutritional intake, I think this is a great tool to help people understand the macronutrient content of the foods they are consuming. As far as the exercise expenditure calculation, I also think this is a great tool. Not everyone has or wears a heart rate monitor to calculate their energy expenditure so being able to see how many calories have been expended after an exercise session may be helpful in keeping client motivated. Ultimately we are still relying on the client to be completely honest with what they are logging into theirexercise and nutritional profile.

As fitness professionals, who out there uses this app (or something similar) themselves and or with their clients? Do you find it useful is getting results? Are there any limitations that you have found?

Please add in your thoughts and comments.

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