MyFitnessPal Evalutation

Tyler Wilson & Lyle Laakso

Professor Hill

Friday 12-1:30

4 November 2013

MyFitnessPal Evalutation

            Want to lose weight and maintain a consistent diet plan? Well, that is a tough load for any individual to handle especially for most of us that are busy with work and school. We make up excuses like “oh, one more won’t do any harm” or “this isn’t that unhealthy” because we don’t know exactly how many calories we’ve eaten which can harm our diet. Thankfully, an easy to use App and user-friendly website are available which measure daily caloric intake and calculate the number of calories burned in a day. MyFitnessPal, a successful website along with a smart-phone App, is a useful resource for any individual to manage their calorie intake and burn rate so they can reach their desired weight. It is customizable, user friendly, and informative.

                     The App doesn’t care if you are a 999 pound male or a 5 pound female (yes, that is an option). The first steps to creating a profile are entering your current weight and your target weight. Next, you have to choose from four vague options; not active, lightly active, pretty active, or heavily active. Your selection of one of these options affects your customized calorie plan, so you should assume that the more active option you select, the more calories you are assumed to be burning and the more you will be allowed to eat.  

The first thing you will see is the giant green number in the upper left of the screen that tells you how many calories you have left to eat in order to keep on track with your diet plan. Now as you eat, you can enter specifically what it is along with number of servings into your “diary” for that day and MyFitnessPal will automatically recalculate your remaining calorie budget for the day. You can also enter data about your specific exercise workouts including duration and intensity that will also adjust your allowed calorie intake. This is handy for people that have difficulty balancing the amount of calories they have burned versus the amount they have eaten.

The App becomes more effective the more you stick to your diet plan. After weighing yourself for the week you can input your new weight into the App. After several weight entries, a graphical representation of your weight change can be seen. Also after you complete all your entries for the day, you can press the “Complete this entry” button which will lead to a screen that gives a prediction to how much you would weigh in five weeks if you ate the same amount of calories you did that day for each day. This may be beneficial for analytical people who like to see how much on average they are losing per day or week. Then if you feel like upping your game, you can change your settings to make your daily calorie intake lower. Your goals will go as far as you want to take them and the App will help you along the way. When I first tried MyFitnessPal, I didn’t really commit, but when I went back to it I lost 15 pounds in 6 weeks,  It even gives users an opportunity to post their exercise entries on their newsfeed so that their friends can see how well they are doing and can cheer them on! 

The App is not only effective for achieving your weight reduction goals, but the accuracy of the nutritional facts of food items is superb. What do I do if I only ate a quarter of that vanilla Greek yogurt? No need to worry, MyFitnessPal lets you enter a specific decimal value of the serving size so that you can be precise down to the gram. If you happen to splurge on some fast food don’t worry, MyFitnessPal has the nutritional values for all fast food chains and many known restaurants. This can be useful for situations like when you make a homemade turkey sandwich. Instead of just searching for a plain turkey sandwich with their search engine, you can search each of the ingredients separately. Also this can benefit users who are making a homemade casserole or dessert. They may not be able to find that dish as a whole, but can search and enter in each ingredient.

Although this App seems to make dieting easy, it is time-consuming. It is really nice that the App has every specific food you can think of from 1% chocolate milk to turkey gravy biscuits, but think about how many different things you eat in one meal. For breakfast this morning, I had biscuits and gravy, turkey bacon, a piece of French toast, peaches, hash browns, yogurt, apple sauce, milk and chocolate milk. That’s nearly ten different things I have to search for, guess the serving sizes, and hope that I know specifically what it is I’m eating. Now, what if you go to Jimmy Johns and order a sandwich?  This sandwich has white bread and numerous ingredients such as: olives, pickles, lettuce, tomatoes, mustard, deli mustard, Dijon mustard, mayo, turkey, ham, and an assortment of cheeses. Searching for and including every ingredient for a sandwich quickly escalates from a good idea to a tedious and drawn out exercise.

Now let’s look at one of the logistics of the App. It basically does two things; adds up the amount of calories you take in from food, and adds up the amount of calories you burn based on your physical activity. This makes sense except for the actual recognition of physical activity. From walking, biking or longboarding to class, to heading up flights of stairs or “watching cops” there are countless things we do throughout our day that consumes calories that we don't even think about. If we were to think about these things and input everything we do all day long, we would only be on our phones and not actually doing the activities.

Another inaccuracy is the precision for categorizing the daily activities. As a “slightly athletic” user I go to the gym every morning for about an hour and a half. Today for example was “back” day, which consists of lifts such as deadlift, rows, pull ups, reverse flys, weighted push-ups and many more. To actually document each and every lift, by weight for each set, would take longer than I actually spend at the gym. This leaves much room for improvement for the App to save time, and be more practical.

The App has two sections for activity: cardiovascular, and strength training. When entering information into strength training it doesn’t register calories being burned, it just documents it so you can look at it later. In the cardiovascular section there is an option for “weight training”, however, it accounts a full hour of lifting to burn only 300 calories. Being inaccurate and painstakingly time consuming, the App seems to be best for keeping track of what you eat and what you do, rather than letting you know precisely how much more or less of either one should be done to achieve your goal.

“The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison,” says Ann Wigmore, a former nutritionist and whole foods advocate. One of the most important parts of losing, or building weight is nutrition. If you expect to shed fat or add on muscle, you have to know what you’re eating and what you should be eating. In order to utilize this aspect of weight loss, there are other weight loss and dieting Apps that can be used, such as “The Calorie Counter” by FatSecret. Most dieting Apps now include recipe books, ideas, and food substitutes to help you keep your mind and body healthy. MyFitnessPal only lets you input what you have eaten, instead of giving you alternatives.

            MyFitnessPal has its advantages and disadvantages. However, as an App to help guide you to weight loss by tracking your caloric intake and output each day, it can be pretty useful if you have the time. The App does do a pretty good job at recording exactly what you eat, exactly what you do, and how often you do it. It provides a good database and record of your workouts, meals, and weight loss. Though it may have a few inaccuracies and lack a few features, it does get the job done. And who wouldn’t want a nice diary to track your path to weight loss?