Tech Tip: My Fitness Pal App

This week, I’ll give you some quick and easy tech tips that can help you with your health and wellness journey.

My favorite app to use is My Fitness Pal. It is available for both iOS and Android. What I like about it is that you have plenty of choices to choose from–restaurant items, restaurant item modifications, and you can even input your own meals. For example, if you are eating a chicken bowl at Chipotle, you can look that up. If you have modified that chicken bowl with no rice, you can look that up as well. What if you can’t find what you are looking for in the database? You can enter it as create your own food and the nutrient values will be input.

If you pay for the premium service, then you can adjust grams that you are eating for carbs/proteins/fats. Only $49/yr and well worth it. If you don’t pay for the premium service, you still get all the features except you can’t enter grams of macros but rather percentages so if your nutritionist tells you to eat x amount of grams, you won’t be able to enter that in unless it is a percentage. 

The nice thing about the app is that you can use the exercise tab to figure out how many calories you burned and it will account for that. I populate it but don’t factor that into my caloric expenditure as I don’t think the app fully captures the amount of calories burned based on the intensity put in. Another nice feature is that the app lets you track your water intake. Finally, if you are looking to connect an exercise tracker, this app can pull data from that and sync with it.

A must have for health and wellness enthusiast is an app that lets you track your food consumption. If you don’t know what and how much you are eating, it will be even harder to reach your goals!