Have you heard of the site and its companion app, My Fitness Pal? I know I am a bit late getting on the bandwagon. One of the incredible people I met a few years ago on Facebook mentioned it to me in response to one of my recent posts.
My Fitness Pal is a FREE service that allows you to calculate your calorie intake and track your exercise activity either manually or via syncing data from many popular fitness apps. Personally I have been using Runtastic for the last few months to track my exercise activity on my iPhone.
I truly believe the service is a heavenly response to my prayers! I had been looking for an alternative to my Weight Watchers Online (WWO) subscription; which I cancelled at the top of this month. I just had not been using the WWO service, consistently. They were taking the money faithfully out of my account, but I was not being faithful in using the service.
Simply because first off I didn’t like the fact that I had to double record a lot of my activity data. Since relocating, I have increased my physical activity and have begun to vary my workouts. Also, many foods and brands I frequent now were not in their database and so I had to do a lot of physical additions even with the barcode scanner. Logging everything was becoming too much of a chore.
Don’t get me wrong WWO is a GREAT service. Through it, I finally learned about portion control and tracking my food intake. With its help, I lost the weight I wanted to before my wedding. However, now that I have a better idea of what I need to do to get fitter and stay healthy; My Fitness Pal just seems to be a better match for me.
I actually believe their open source style food database is BETTER than WWO for helping me to log the foods and brands I eat. Their app and website make it fun to keep up with my food diary. I also like the fact I can print out my activity and see actually what I have been putting in my belly… My food diary will help me to make smarter choices when going food shopping.
My Fitness Pal also has a social network component that allows me to encourage my friends (and them in turn me) on as we collectively work towards our fitness goals. After signing up and sending my first buzz communication about the service, I didn’t know I had so many friends that already use it! Now I have a whole new focused portion of my folks that share my general desire to get healthier and stay that way!
Please note the above article was not a paid advertisement. I am a real user of the service. If you would like to reach me on My Fitness Pal, my username is “lelajfagan”.
Created by MyFitnessPal – Free Calorie Counter
© 2013, Lela Jefferson Fagan. All rights reserved.
