My Fitness Pal

   Hello everyone! I hope that all of you are doing well out there on the roads and trails. I actually ran outside a couple of times this week! Can you believe it? After getting my beloved treadmill this January I turned soft and didn’t do any outside running. While I did manage to log some serious miles and complete some specific workouts on it; it didn’t do much to improve my road running ability. In my experience, there’s just no substitute for running on pavement or trails. The treadmill is a good tool. But, shouldn’t replace what you’re most likely going to run on during your upcoming races. As the weather continues to improve over the next month I’m going to gradually work on increasing my time running outside. Even though it’s hitting the 40’s and 50’s outside, there’s still some snow forecasted for upstate NY’s future. So, I can’t lay the treadmill to rest just quite yet!

   As you know, I’m a huge fan of the amazing tools available out there that can help you reach your fitness goals. I’ve already written extensively about my love of Fitbit’s products. Today, I’d like to tell you about another tool that I use extensively every day to help me reach my goals, a smart phone app called MyFitnessPal.

   In 2005 a computer programmer named Mike Lee in San Francisco, California was getting married on the beach that summer and wanted to look good for the event. He hired a personal trainer. His trainer knew what they were doing and not only revised Mike’s fitness routine; but, also his diet. At that time the only way to track someone’s diet was by manually searching for a food’s nutrition information in bulky manuals, hand weighing the amount and tracking it in a handwritten log or personally created database. Sometimes nutrition information for certain foods were unavailable, it was challenging to weigh every item of food item and even more tedious to notate the nutrition information.

   Mike thought that whole dietary tracking side of his fitness plan could be greatly improved. So, that’s when he turned his programming skills loose and created MFP. In nine years MFP has grown to become the most widely used dietary tracking app available of both the Android and Apple markets boasting 50 million users. That’s right 50 million! Its online food database contains 3.5 million different food items and their accompanying nutrition information. It’s easy to use, supports full synchronization across numerous other fitness tracking products and programs and here’s the best part, absolutely free!

   I’ve been using MFP for a long time. Along with Fitbit’s products, these two tools helped me lose over 20 lbs. and finally break four hours in a marathon. Here are some of the best reasons why you may find it as useful as I do to help you reach your fitness goals.   

   MFP is free. Who doesn’t like free? Nobody that I know of would turn down something because it was free. Unfortunately, in today’s fast paced sales market free doesn’t usually equate to high quality. Free products are often below grade and typically are a stripped-down lite version of full price products. Not MFP. There isn’t a pay version of the app, comes with all the available features and sports a free online website program. This is one of the only apps I would ever consider paying double digits for. But, after nine years, I'm ’till waiting for the company to attach a price tag.

   MFP works with so many different other fitness products and programs. Like Fitbit, MFP realizes that people who want to improve their fitness may use many different tools and methods to reach their goals. I just love this concept. I’ve been using both Fitbit and MFP together religiously and rarely have any problems linking or combining their various fitness related data that they collect. It’s a very versatile product.

   MFP’s extremely easy to use. Nowadays everyone but everyone has a smartphone. I’m attached to mine and bring it everywhere that I go. MFP uses your smartphone’s camera to scan a packaged food’s bar code to retrieve its nutrition information. You can also search for foods by name. Other than homemade concoctions I rarely have problems finding food items. You can even create and save specialized food items and meals. After entering your personal physical data and your target, it calculates how many calories you can consume in a day, records everything you eat and displays your progress in easy-to-read graphs and charts. It even remembers foods that you frequently eat. If you exercise that also can be entered and recorded. It calculates calories burned based on your weight that day. Just like food entries, specialized exercises and workouts can be created and saved. Most major restaurants have also made their meal’s nutrition information available to MFP. Nutrition information is very accurate and routinely updated. The more people that use the app, the more the database will grow and the better it will become. 

   MFP uses social media. The online version and the app itself have a Facebook-like community. You can make friends with other users, comment on activities, trade ideas and celebrate victories. Nothing is more effective in reaching fitness related goals than being part of a supportive like-mined group. They will keep you honest too when you want to fudge stuff.

   MFP is informative and instructive. Two of the biggest problems facing our obese country are calorie-dense food products and improper portion control. If you are truthful when using MFP and correctly weigh your food products, then you quickly realize that the amounts food you thought you were eating was greatly under scored. You’ll also discover that certain foods are more calorie dense than others. Weight loss is all about trade offs. But, it boils down to simple math. If you burn more than you consume, then you’re going to lose weight. One of the biggest advantages to MFP is that it teaches you proper portion sizing and the value of eating the right kinds of foods. For instance, I could eat three chicken wings or three ounces of chicken breast. Both have similar calorie amounts. But, I’ll get more food product if I choose the healthier option of chicken breast. Most diets fail because they focus on calorie restriction and unreal food products like shakes in place of real food. Unless you make changes to your diet than you can sustain your entire life, then you’re going to revert back to old habits and food choices. You’re going to put the weight back on.

   Other than the occasionally incorrect calorie amount for a food entry the only issue that I have with MFP is all that health personal information. As with other fitness related tools like Fitbit’s products, you have to provide your personal information to make it work. If you’re uncomfortable with doing this then maybe MFP isn’t for you. But, if you’d like to become more realistic with the amounts of food that you eat, learn how to to make better food choices and do it with just a few fingers for absolutely nothing, then check out MFP. It won’t lose the weight for you. But it’s one hell of a powerful tool that can help you achieve your fitness goals!

   Ride that lighting my friends…