MyFitnessPal App Review

By 360 Culture Ninja, Marc Hansen

• One of the biggest contributors to a healthy lifestyle is being aware of what you eat on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. We've added nutritional tracking as a category for earning points in our 360 Fit program and wanted to research some tools to help our employees monitor their nutritional intake. After researching a handful of options, we decided our top recommendation is MyFitnessPal.com and their mobile application.

• MyFitnessPal is a community-based site designed to help you lose weight and track fitness goals. Their free smartphone app is available for iPhone and Android based systems making calorie counting on the go easier. With a user friendly interface and over 500,000 preloaded foods included in the database, keeping track of your nutrition is a breeze. If you are having trouble finding certain foods, Android users have the option to scan the barcode of a product and MyFitnessPal will pinpoint it in seconds. How convenient!

• We also like that you can see more than just your calories. MyFitnessPal breaks down your daily calories into fat, protein, and carbohydrates. This information not only helps you monitor your calories, but also ensures you're pairing your food appropriately to get the right portions of fat, protein and carbs. It's amazing how fast those fats can add up or how often we find ourselves eating too many carbs and too few proteins!

• You can also calculate the amount of calories burned from exercise with this app. It takes into account the number of calories burned from your workout and gives you the net amount of how many calories you consumed that day. Accuracy, of course, depends largely on reported portion sizes. So pay attention! Be sure to check the serving size listed on the label and do your best to estimate how much you actually ate. All-in-all this is a fantastic app and a great tool to use for any weight-loss regimen.