My Fitness Pal

I mentioned my streak on My Fitness Pal (MFP) the other day. I thought I should talk a little more about the website/app, especially as their latest app update has fixed my major issue with using the app instead of the website.

I started tracking my food on MFP in April of 2011. At that point, I had been writing my food on paper, eating clean about 90% of the time. But I knew deep down that I needed more structure. Eating clean can be easy, and many people do well with it alone. But I like food in volume. I needed better portion control! So when I got home from a cruise, I started tracking online.

Like anything new, it takes a while to get used to. But MFP has such a huge database that it was fairly easy. And I love being able to scan my food with the app. You can also copy meals from that meal time for any previous day that week, which is super helpful if you eat the same thing most days. They show a list of your most added foods and your recently added foods on the website to make it easy to find these. On the app, you used to only be able to see recent foods from that meal time but the new update lets you also look at all recent foods.

I was able to add and rename meal times also. They start you with four (I think) but I have six (titled meals 1-6, but this can be changed also). I like that better than looking at everything I ate from 4 or 5am to noon in one “meal”! Making a recipe is easy to do, as is seeing the breakdown of your day by different categories. There are the usual calories, fat, protein, carbs and sodium but it will also show others and you can adjust the breakdown you want to aim for if you’d like.

There is also an exercise feature, which logs your workouts and adjusts your calories for the day accordingly. One issue I have is that adding any workouts in their “strength training” section does not change your calorie goal. I know not everyone is like this, but if I’m going to lift heavy, I need to adjust. I enter all workouts under the “cardiovascular” section.

Each day, when you complete your food diary, they tell you that if every day were like that day, you would weigh X lbs in Y weeks. Pretty nifty!

I’ve continued logging my food during pregnancy because I know myself and I would go overboard without some accountability. I don’t always stay within their calorie goal (I changed it from wanting to lose weight to maintenance), but I know that the act of writing it down…even virtually…is better than not. Most days I’m under slightly.

And to finish it out, a picture to mark 32 weeks (yesterday). This was on our way to Breastfeeding class.