I have known that I needed to lose weight for quite some time, but I never had the motivation to do it until I needed to drop a few pounds to go Zip Lining in Kauai. I thought about what diets I might try, but I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money on classes and books, I just wanted to control my eating, so I did what all 21st Century People do, I checked to see if there was an app for that, and low and behold there was. It was MyFitnessPal.
MyFitnessPal is a website that helps you track your caloric intake, but besides the site they have apps for just about every smart phone type out there. Say you want to eat a Subway sandwich, you would just type the sub you got in to the search bar, pick the one with options you got, and add it to the meal you are eating it for. It is that easy, and they have tons of menus and meals in their database, and more people are adding to it all the time, so you can search for just about anything and find it. Plus they have a barcode scanner, so you can just scan your pack of chips you shouldn’t be eating and it pops right up.
When you first start it asks you for your height, weight, weight goal, age, birthdate, gender, and most importantly how much weight you want to lose per week, so that it can setup calorie limits for you. If you go over your limit you get to see by how many calories, and it will also yell at you if you have had too few calories as well, so that you are not getting too aggressive on your diet.
It also tracks your other nutrients, so you can make sure that you are not eating to much sodium and bloating away all your weight loss, or to make sure you are still getting your vitamins. If you really want that ice cream sundae, you can plug in your exercise to add calories to your available daily intake.
MyFitnessPal also has social hooks to make it in to kind of a social network. For me it is a social network of one. I let my wife see and that is it, but it is good to have some accountability.
Like all calorie counters it only works if you use it, and sometimes I kind of look like a jerk when I pull out my phone to see if I have enough calories to eat something, but it is for my greater health. Will it work for you? Probably, and it has definitely worked for me: I have lost 25lbs and counting. Not bad for a free app, so I don’t care if they are selling my info it is more than worth it.
Hey man, That’s awesome congrats on the progress. I lost an initial 60 pounds using that app and gym time last year. Keep it up. It’s good to read others succeeding with it. Keeps me motivated too. The hard part is always learning that its a life style choice in order to maintain.
Yeah, I am pretty sure that even if I get down to my target weight that I will probably just set the amount I want to lose per week to zero, and keep using it. I am not sure that I would be able to keep it off without it.