But it wasn’t until this past week that I finally dove into the world of My Fitness Pal. HOLY COW this thing is AWESOME! It’s free to download. It is an app for iPhone or Android. There is also a full website version as well. And the database is HUGE!!!
When I first started tracking nutrition, there weren’t awesome options, and I went with “Tap & Track”. It took so much effort initially to input (MANUALLY) all my favorite food labels that I wasn’t going to ever leave my Tap & Track. The startup time and energy that I had put into it pretty much locked me into it. And it worked (and still works) great. But the database was limited and so there were many, many foods I had to create as custom foods, which took a lot of time and effort.
I’ve heard y’all talk about myfitnesspal for quite some time, but I already had my own system in place so “if it ain’t broke, why fix it”. But then my buddy at church let me play with his for a while and I realized what I’m missing.
The database is monstrous! PB2? Yep! Shakeology? You know it (even the new Tropical)! Wheybolic Extreme 60 (chocolate flavor)? Duh, of course! Sun Warrior Natural plant protein? You bet! Pure Protein chocolate deluxe bars? Absolutely! Braum’s fat free yogurt? Yep (pick your flavor!). Purple Wraath intra-workout supplement? Bingo! I can’t stump this thing! For a newbie, you HAVE to get myfitnesspal. You won’t have to input your own custom foods. This has ’em all!
Oh, and guess what else??!! It has a built in SCANNER so you can simply hold it up to the nutrition label of any food you are looking at and it will automatically pull it into your app. BAM!
You can create and pre-save meals and recipes (like my wife’s homemade bread) for one-click entry the next time. It remembers your favorites and recent entries.
I’m in love ….. :-)
Oh, and did I forget to mention ….. IT’S FREE!! Get it people. You’ll have NO EXCUSE to not know exactly how many grams of protein, carbs, and fats you’ve had at any point in your day!
There also seems to be some buddy features for accountability, so that would be pretty cool for a group as big as ours. My screen name is “coachwayne” if any of you want to come add me and keep tabs on me :-). But be warned, if you don’t log your nutrition I’ll know it!!! LOL! (anyone wanting to post your MyFitnessPal screen name, do so in the comments section below and we can all link up).
TIP = You can also go into “settings” and “my diary sharing” and set it to “friends” so that any of us that are your friends can see exactly what you are putting into your pie hole every day! LOL! Talk about some added incentive to eat clean! YIKES!
The biggest drawback I’ve found so far is that on the website interface, you CAN’T see a pie chart of your percentages. You CAN see it on the phone app though, and since I do all my tracking on my phone that’s not a huge negative for me. After looking at some of the message boards, it looks like many are calling for the web interface to include a pie chart so I’m sure that will be coming soon.
It has the “exercise” feature, but I prefer to just leave that empty since I don’t try to add calories back for exercise. I have a daily total of calories I’m shooting for and I don’t want to adjust for exercise. (You can also create your exercises if you like to track that but assign 0 calories to it or if you do assign calories to it, don’t eat the extra calories it then allots you to make up for the exercise).
TIP =To customize your percentages and calorie totals (depending on which phase of the nutrition plan you are on) = Login to Myfitnesspal’s website. Go to the MyHome Tab at the top then click Goals. Next click the change goals button when the page loads. Finally click to place the selection on custom goals and hit continue. This will take you to the custom goal screen where you can input the calories and percent goals 50/30/20 or whatever percentages you want. Then sync your changes on the phone app and you can view the ratios you set.
Need a coach?
My email: coachwayne@teamripped.com
IG: @wayne_wyatt
