I’m sure anyone who’s taken LFIT is familiar with MyFitnessPal. For those of you that aren’t so fortunate to have taken college P.E., MyFitnessPal is a website that tracks the amount of calories you eat and burn in a day. In the LFIT program, students are required to track their calorie consumption for one week.
What you may not know is that MyFitnessPal also has iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone applications. After I started running two months ago and didn’t see any real results, I decided to download the app two weeks ago to see what I was eating on a daily basis.
When you first download MyFitnessPal, it asks you for basic information, i.e. your height, weight, etc. It also asks you to set a goal. This is really important, since the application will calculate how many calories you can intake on a daily basis based on how much weight you want to lose. I wanted to lose 1-1 1/2 pounds each week, and starting at 190 pounds and 6-feet 1-inch tall, I was allowed to eat 1610 calories each week.
The app doesn’t give you any basic nutrition information after that. I would have liked to see how much protein, fat and carbs I should have been consuming, but it’s a feature that has yet to be implemented.
What the app does, however, is cleanly list what you’ve eaten in a day. To calculate how many calories you’ve eaten, you enter the name of the food and MyFitnessPal pulls up the nutritional values.
It knows tons of foods, and there’s also a nifty feature that lets you scan the barcodes of packages to get the amount per serving.
If you’re eating food that isn’t packaged or served in a meal, calculating the actual amount of calories you ate can be difficult. When doing this, I converted cups into spoonfuls (i.e. one serving spoon scoop = 1/2 cup), but I’m not even sure if my math is correct. It would be cool if MyFitnessPal came up with a way to allow people to measure the size of their food.
Adding exercise is even easier. If you run on a treadmill, you can just take the minutes you ran at the speed in miles per hour you ran to calculate how many calories you burned.
Does it work?
Yes, the MyFitnessPal app works very well. Using it after every meal has made me more aware of my eating habits (damn you, snacking!) and also continues to give me reason to pause when choosing what to eat in the dining halls. Since starting two weeks ago, I’ve gone down three pounds, and I don’t plan on quitting the application. Though it may not be so advanced in features, the bottom line is that MyFitnessPal is helping me lose weight.
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