MyFitnessPal Review

If you’re anything like me, you will find dieting difficult and rather boring. It will mean that you can’t enjoy as many treats and you probably can’t enjoy that Friday night curry. You will be hungry and you will generally want what you can’t have. You will then give up after a few months and then moan about your lumps and bumps. However, when I started using MyFitnessPal as a tool towards losing weight and eating healthy I’ve found losing weight an enjoyable experience and, quite frankly, easy.

(If you’re wondering why a TTC blog is writing about fitness, you can read about the reasoning behind our decision to lose weight in our earlier post.)

Now, I’m not going to be one of those fatties that lecture on healthy eating like smoker-turned-non-smokers do but it is so important that you start off right and eat healthy. It will not work if you think that by just having a snickers bar for lunch (even though it may mean you stay within your calorie limit for the day) will be OK. It won’t, as your general ‘Fat’ limit for the day, and probably the week, will be over. You will not lose weight – you must eat healthier for it to make a difference.

Firstly, MyFitnessPal will work for you as long as you’re willing to weigh out certain foods. It does come with a HUGE database of food so that when you scan the barcode of the item it will appear with all the nutritional details, so all you then have to do is input how many or how much of said item you had, but you will sometimes have to physically weigh out the item. You can just guess and put a rough estimate in if you’re good at weights, but if you want to get a realistic view of your daily intake, then I suggest weighing food out.

This will become a lot less tedious after a while as the app will remember previous foods used. After a while, you will also know how much 30g will look like, for example. You will also know how many calories will be in something, which will help you decide whether or not to have it. On top of this, you can also create ‘recipes’, which enable you to input a whole meal and select how many it should serve (not how much of it you want). Once created, you can then select the recipe over and over without having to input each separate ingredient over and over every time.

From the healthy point of view, the app also gives you a run down of how much of a particular group (carbs, fat, protein, etc) you eat as well as how much of a certain vitamin you’re eating, which I think is really useful for someone TTC. This can be selected as a weekly or daily view. On top of this, you can record your weight as well as your general measurements.

I really like this app, and it’s definitely been the contributing factor to me losing weight. I could have given it a go without it, but I wouldn’t have realised that certain things were still bad for me, not to mention the amount. It may not work for you, as weighing your foods can be rather tedious, but after a while you will get used to it, especially if it means you can have that extra Yorkshire pudding. The app is clear and easy to use and it can link to hardware such as the Fitbit or RunKepper.

So, by logging what you’re eating and what exercise you’re doing you really find out how good (and how bad) certain foods are. You also see how easy it is to gain calories back into your ‘pot’ by doing simple exercises. It’s not rocket science to know that a biscuit is unhealthy, but for me, finding out that wholegrain bread with fancy seeds in it is 124 calories a slice broke my heart as I thought it would be a good alternative to normal brown bread, so it’s worth doing your research when you do your next food shop.

K

If you would like to join me and/or S on MyFitnessPal, feel free to pop us a quick message to get our details to add us – the more the merrier!