Last Updated on December, 2024
Tracking and counting calories is a crucial aspect of leading a healthy lifestyle. Awareness of your foods and their nutritional value is key to helping you make healthier choices and supporting your health and fitness goals.
However, manual tracking of foods is a challenging task that can often result in inaccurate estimates.
Resorting to a good tracking tool will eliminate as many inaccuracies as possible to make tracking easier and less stressful.
MyFitnesspal is a highly rated meal-tracking app that is becoming more and more popular by the day due to its reliable tracking features. It even has a massive user base of 200 million.
In this Myfitnesspal review, you can learn all you need to know about the app to understand if this app is suitable for you.
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Table Of Contents
- MyFitnessPal: Outline
- Getting Started With MyFitnessPal
- How Does MyFitnessPal Work?
- More on Calorie Counting With the MyFitnessPal App
- Key Features of the MyFitnessPal
- How Much Does MyFitnessPal Cost?
- Pros & Cons: MyFitnessPal
- User Reviews Of MyFitnessPal
- Alternative to Consider
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Final Words: Is MyFitnessPal Worth it?
MyFitnessPal: Outline
MyFitnessPal is an app that helps users track their meals and workouts to control and achieve their fitness and weight loss goals.
It was launched in 2005 by Mike Lee and has since reached a user base of over 200 million across 120 countries to log meals and track their physical activity, weight, and wellness habits.
As the name suggests, the app acts as a fitness pal, guiding users through personalized action plans, including meal plans (daily calorie goal, macro, and micronutrient targets) and exercise routines.
A unique feature of this fitness tracker is the over 14 million large searchable food database, with more and more being added. This makes it unrivaled against other apps that act as calorie counters, as it improves the accuracy of calorie tracking.
Also, there is a free version of the app with impressive and convenient features.
Getting Started With MyFitnessPal
To create a free Myfitnesspal account, download the app from the Apple App Store or Android Play Store and sign up.
You can also sign up and use it through their website: myfitnesspal.com.
You can get started by feeding all the relevant details into your account.
You will be required to input details, including birth date, gender, height, current weight, baseline activity level, your goal weight (lose weight, maintain weight, gain weight), and your weekly goals.
This allows myfitnesspal to interpret and calculate appropriate daily caloric goals to help you reach your target weight.
After this initial process, you can start navigating the app to explore the functions and features offered.
How Does MyFitnessPal Work?
Here is a brief outline of how it operates;
Note: For automatic exercise tracking and logging, you can connect MyfitnessPal to compatible devices, including MapMyRun, FitBit, and Garmin. Myfitnesspal will acquire data on the number of steps and other exercise forms like strength training and yoga through these apps.
Below are a few key points that Myfitnesspal recommends for accuracy and reliable progress;
More on Calorie Counting With the MyFitnessPal App
Calorie counting can be a bit of a complicated subject because it fails to highlight the varying health benefits of consuming foods with the same number of calories.
For example, a bowl of pasta and a mixed chicken salad with nuts can have the same amount of calories. Although that can be the case, the number of proteins, carbs, fats, vitamins, salt, and minerals can vary widely.
But if you have to pick the healthier choice from pasta vs. mixed salad, it would be mixed salad.
For calorie counting to work sensibly, the health benefits of certain foods should be established.
Because, after all, it’s not just about consuming foods amounting to the total recommended calories to lose weight; it is rather about feeding and fueling your body with foods containing healthy calories.
To get started, you can compare myfitnesspal recipes with other healthy recipes to understand nutritional value. As a calorie counter, Myfitnesspal considers your daily movement and workouts into calculations.
This consideration can negatively affect the final calorie recommendations because the calories burned during various day-to-day activities and exercise widely vary based on the individual and the activity. Meaning it is close to impossible to assume a figure.
It would be wise to skip this consideration if you want reliable estimates. You can turn off this feature under the app’s settings to ensure calculations are based on your total daily calories, which should include your average fitness levels from the profile you created.
Key Features of the MyFitnessPal
Creates a Personalized Action Plan
Myfitnesspal generates a tailor-made action plan to suit the needs and goals of the specific individual. This plan will lay out your daily calories, personal macronutrients, and micronutrient targets.
When on the premium version, you can adjust your goals as you see fit throughout the week. This handy feature will allow you to seamlessly account for your varying days, like when you are expecting to hit the gym or consume more calories than usual.
This will precisely align with your lifestyle rather than staying strict with a set plan.
Intuitive Nutrition and Workout Tracking
Although Myfitnesspal’s core function is a calorie counter to track your calorie intake and usage, the app also offers many workouts. This comes in handy if you are looking to burn those consumed calories.
Unlike workouts from dedicated workout apps, these exercises aren’t necessarily interactive but meet the requirements with proper guidance to inspire you to burn those calories. Also, the exercises are designed to be beginner-friendly to drive more motivation to get started.
Has a Sustainable Approach to Food and Workouts
Myfitnesspal resets our mental attitude towards food and exercise to help users build a sustainable relationship with food and exercise.
This is important in the long run because it is about developing healthy habits that become innate to you, allowing you to experience reliable and lasting results.
The app will illustrate stats on how likely you are to achieve your goals with your current calorie consumption and usage.
The app also breaks down the macronutrients you consume daily to show how much nutrients the body gains, not just calories.
This will help you make better and healthier food choices, not just to amount to the recommended calorie intake.
Gives Access to a Massive Food Database
Myfitnesspal has a massive database of over 14 million foods you can search from, and you will find the foods you want to track. This database is unrivaled when compared to other calorie-counting apps.
Having this massive database makes the calorie estimates generated by Myfitnesspal more accurate because other apps with limited foods will lack the ability to track certain foods, making the estimates less accurate and unreliable.
Compatible With Many Other Apps
Myfitnesspal is compatible with many apps and wearable devices to allow you to automatically sync your physical activity data on the app to make calculations more accurate. It avoids the need to input it manually.
These apps include Fitbit, Apple Watch, Garmin, MapMyRun, and Samsung Health.
The only downside is that these apps are not dedicated strength training fitness trackers, which can affect the accuracy.
Barcode Scanner
The premium membership has a barcode scanning feature that allows you to scan your food’s barcode, allowing the app to access the information and nutritional value for calculations.
This again eliminates any likely inaccuracies if the food is not on the database.
Community Feature
Myfitnesspal offers a big and active community base to allow users to interact with other users. Through this interaction, users can share the progress of their journey, give tips on how best to utilize the app’s features, and gain encouragement from other members.
This spirit that comes out of this community interaction is important to drive results.
How Much Does MyFitnessPal Cost?
The MyFitnesspal app is free to download and use. However, there is a premium version offering many more exciting features.
The Premium subscription is priced at $9.99 per month and $49.99 per year.
Getting started with the free version allows you to explore and experience the basic features and functionalities offered by the app.
If satisfied with your experience, you can upgrade to a Premium membership.
That said, the premium version also comes with a one-month free trial to allow users to determine if it is worth a shot.
Free Vs. Premium Version of MyFitnessPal
The free version of the app offers some great features for beginners. However, advanced trackers will require the advanced features available through the Myfitnesspal premium subscription.
Here’s how the premium version tops the free version;
As you can see above, the list of features locked into the premium version is handy for all seasoned trackers.
Pros & Cons: MyFitnessPal
Pros
Cons
User Reviews Of MyFitnessPal
The online user reviews of Myfitnesspal are impressive.
With over 200 million downloads, Android holds an average rating of 4.5/5 derived from 2.5 million reviews, and iOS has an average rating of 4.7/5 derived from 1.4 million.
Those pretty compelling stats reflect the satisfactory experience that most users share.
Users on the premium subscription have praised the app, while the free crowd has complained about the distracting ads, as expected.
Here are some success stories from verified users;
One of the best weight loss apps on the market. I’ve tried it a couple times in early days but found it messy to use. It has improved out of sight now and I’m really enjoying using it. The barcoding scanner is magic. Counting calories/kilojoules – easy. Putting in own recipes -simple. It has even included intermittent fasting for those following that eating style. Throw everything else away.
Figure 1. A user who is enjoying the many robust features of Myfitnesspal.
Absolutely amazing app! Really easy to use. It’s helping me so much every day on my weight loss journey. I’ve tried both versions, free and premium. I’m on a premium one now and loving it. I don’t understand all the negative feedback. It looks like some people just don’t know how to use it or aren’t determined enough to actually stick to their diet and recording food.
Figure 2. A user who has enjoyed both versions of the app.
Alternative to Consider
If you are still unsure of Myfitnesspal or are looking for something more, below are a few other options you can explore.
1st Phorm
The 1st phorm app is an all-in-one fitness app that supports your health and fitness goals. From counting calories to workouts, the 1st Phorm app has all the tools to support your transformation. The features offered are similar to myfitnesspal in tracking calories and macros.
The app also provides additional information on how to keep your fitness journey going.
The app also offers community support for encouragement and motivation from other users and daily live streams for advice. You can take assessments to evaluate your progress and improve accordingly.
Noom
Noom is an app that helps users meet personal health and wellness goals through behavioral science as the main approach. It was initially started as a weight loss and management-focused app but now addresses overall health maintenance.
Noom offers personal coaching to guide users to take control of their health journey by helping them build sustainable habits to reach their goals. Noom is a great option if you also prefer one-on-one guidance.
Weight Watchers
Weight Watchers can help you lose weight with the help of customized plans and support from expert coaches. This program does not strictly focus on calorie intake; it helps users build a better relationship with food and guides them to track what they eat.
It uses an allocated point system for foods, and food consumption should be within the assigned point value for the user.
Other workout program reviews:
Frequently Asked Questions
Final Words: Is MyFitnessPal Worth it?
Yes, Myfitnesspal is 100% worth it as a meal-tracking app. Both the free and the premium versions offer some pretty nifty features. Since the free version gives so many tracking features, the paid version is worth the investment to take your health and fitness journey to a whole other level.
The number of downloads and user reviews alone reflect the reliability of Myfitnesspal as a calorie counter. It is an impressive calorie-counting tool, and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to support their weight loss and fitness journey.
I hope this MyFitnesspal review gave you insights to help you decide if it is worth your investment.
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