#58 Food and Exercise Logging Software

SPINNING NEWSLETTER #58:

FOOD AND EXERCISE LOGGING SOFTWARE:

I have written several times about the value of programs to track calories consumed from food and burned from exercise. They are a great way to provide both information and accountability for your fitness program. I encourage my personal training clients and indoor cycling students to use one of these programs.

The problem has been selecting a program from the dozens out there. After using several, I selected MyFitnessPal for my own use and to recommend. Today I saw that PC Magazine chose the app as its “Editor’s Choice”. The review focuses on the program for iPhone but versions are also available for use on your PC or Android device. I really like using it on my smartphone.

I wanted to share this with you right away. Part of the review follows below. You can read the entire review at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2393271,00.asp#fbid=m2ABikn_FnA


RESOURCES:
Recent past issues of this newsletter are available at http://billroachblog.blogspot.com

Thank you!

Bill Roach
Star 3 Lifetime Certified Spinning Instructor
Certified Personal Trainer, National Academy of Sports Medicine
bill.roach@mchsi.com



MyFitnessPal (for iPhone)
REVIEW DATE : September 21, 2011
BOTTOM LINE:
The free fitness app MyFitnessPal is one of the best all-in-one calorie counter and exercise trackers for the iPhone. A simple design and interface make using the app a quick chore rather than a fatiguing project, which is essential when trying to reach a fitness goal.

PROS: Enormous catalog of foods, meals, recipes. Better interface than competitors. Options for imperial or metric systems. Has both daily and weekly overviews. Allows for decimal places in weight, fractions in volume. Includes barcode scanner for finding packaged foods' nutritional information. Most functions work offline.

CONS:
Lackluster push notifications (not enough options). Not highly visual.

COMPANY:
MyFitnessPal LLC

SPEC DATA:

Type: Personal
Free: Yes
By Jill Duffy
"I have the secret to losing weight: Consume fewer calories than you expend." That's a bit of an old joke, and while the punchline is true, it's easier said than done. We live in a world of stress, temptation, cheap pleasures, and convenience—all of which can affect our diet and health. Losing weight (or gaining or maintaining weight) isn't really just a matter of math, although if you can incorporate the math easily enough, it can give you a leg up. MyFitnessPal is a website that gives you a wealth of tools for doing the math required for managing your weight, and the companion iPhone app (free) by the same name is even better (there are apps for Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry, too). The MyFitnessPal iPhone app couldn't be easier or quicker to use, and that's what sets it apart from the pack of other calorie-counting apps in the App Store and makes it our Editors' Choice.

Unlike other popular fitness apps, such as Lose It! and Calorie Tracker by Livestrong.com, MyFitnessPal doesn't have you needlessly jumping from screen to screen every time you log a food you've eaten, beverage you've consumed, or exercise you've completed. That little bit of optimization in usability—keeping you on the screen you need to see, or returning you to it automatically—goes a long way over time, so you can keep moving rather than sit still, inputting data.


How it Works
MyFitnessPal is a calorie counter and exercise tracker. It's not a complete weight loss program with deep nutritional recommendations, tips, or advice. At this point in time, it's pretty well impossible to get safe and accurate information to that degree for your body in the context of your life from a machine alone. You really need a trained professional for step-by-step instruction and help.

What an app can do, however, is help you figure out how many calories you're eating versus how many you're burning. Apps can also help you track and watch over time changes, like your weight or waist size. MyFitnessPal does all these things very well, especially if you open it up and make use of it several times a day, every day. To work correctly, you have to be diligent about logging everything you eat and drink, and all the exercise you get. Like any diet and health program, you have to do the work. The tools are there to help you do the work, but the onus is on you.

Get Ready to Lose, Gain, or Maintain Weight
Some apps have user profiles that are optional, but MyFitnessPal can only work if you tell it a whole lot about yourself, including your age, height, gender, weight, and general level of activity. For activity, MyFitnessPal provides very good descriptions of the several options it has, helping point you toward the right one. For example, anyone with a desk job should select Sedentary, even if they are very active outside work. Cardiovascular activities are logged separately; the activity setting just helps the app establish a baseline for how many calories you burn if you don't do anything else.

Another part of the set up process—and perhaps the part most users are eager to reach—is setting a goal. You can choose to gain, lose, or maintain weight, but the app restricts you from trying to lose more than two pounds (a little less than one kilo) per week. Once you've set your goal, the app calculates a target number of calories you should net in a day. The "net" is not the same as the total number of calories you should consume. Consumption will change based on how much exercise you do, but the net will remain the same as long as your goal and profile information stay the same. MyFitnessPal always displays these numbers with clear labels so you're never left guessing what they mean.

Day-to-Day Fitness Tracking
One of the main functions of MyFitnessPal is to count calories. The diary is the place where you record what you eat and the cardiovascular and weight-training exercises you complete. The app lets you categorize food into meals: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Exercise only has two categories: cardiovascular and strength (weight-training). Optionally, you can track how much water you drink, too, as well as keep notes in a freeform text field for food and exercise.

Entering foods and activities into the diary is dead simple. Other apps bounce you from one screen to another when logging foods, and MyFitnessPal seems to streamline this process better than other apps. From the "add" page, you can select the meal or type of exercise. A new page opens where you can find the item you want. For food and drink, you can search or scroll through frequent, recent, My Foods, meals, and recipes. All these pages work despite whether you're connected to the Internet, another reason this app works so much better than others of its kind. MyFitnessPal also gives you much more granularity than Livestrong.com's app when entering how much food or drink you consumed—eighths, quarters, two-thirds, etc. for MyFitnessPal versus multiples of quarters only.

The food catalog that MyFitnessPal pulls from is outstanding, with brand-name foods from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., restaurant dishes, even recipes from leading cooking and fitness magazines. Most food apps use a database maintained by the USDA, which includes not only fresh foods, but also chain restaurant food and thousands of packaged items—but MyFitnessPal 's catalog is so much better than other apps' because it includes recipes, meals, and foods that other users have upload. Any user can share a recipe that she or he has created, although only from the website (not from the app), and only when the user specifically chooses to do so—the default is always to keep the information private. But a lot of people do share their recipes and food items, and it's a huge part of what makes MyFitnessPal so great. You can't see who uploaded the information, only the food name and nutritional information about it.

Caloric Breakdown
When you launch MyFitnessPal, after setting up an account, you'll always land on the Daily Summary page, which gives you a quick look at your goal net calories, how many you have consumed so far today, and how many you've burned today. A newsfeed below the summary can be customized to show only the kinds of alerts and updates from your own activity or your friends that you want to see.

MyFitnessPal recommends each user eat a certain percent of carbohydrates, fat, and protein. The app displays this information in a pie chart (see the slideshow). You can view this graph for an entire week's averages, or by day.


During the week, the app also shows you a bar graph of how many calories you consumed each day, and whether you exceeded, hit, or came up short on your intake goal. At the end of the week, the app calculates an average. See the slideshow of an example when I exceeded my net calorie goal for two days, but hit the desired average for the week, meaning I should have lost one pound (and I did!).

Nutrient Details
Another batch of statistics that you can view by week or by day is your list of nutrients. This chart is the one most likely to be off from your actual intake, as there are many foods in the app that don't have complete details filled in. MyFitnessPal warns and reminds you that information might be missing, and it usually doesn't affect the overall calories. If your goal is to manage your weight, the app still works just fine when it's missing a few of these details.

If you log foods that have accurate and complete data associated with them, you can see how close you came, in a week or a single day, to meeting all your nutritional needs. In watching how the app recorded my progress, I noticed I was racking up a lot of grams of sugar in the morning, which was helpful to know. MyFitnessPal doesn't distinguish between the type of sugars or carbohydrates you eat, so it doesn't provide real detailed assessment. That's on you. But I'd love to see it happen in apps eventually. For example, if I hit my target percent of carbohydrates for the day, I would like information on the pie chart showing me that too many of those carbohydrates were sugars and not enough where complex carbohydrates. It's a fairly nuanced nutritional detail (which may creates legal complications for app makers), but I would love to see personal technology devices master it.

Weight Tracking
The iPhone app MyFitnessPal lets you track your weight in pounds or kilos, and with as many digits after the decimal place as you want. Over time, your measurements are plotted on a line graph. You can also record your measurements in inches or centimeters to track your waist, hips, and neck size. What I like about the line graph is it shows progress in intervals of one month, two months, or three months, which helped remind me of the long-term commitment to fitness tracking. Weight-tracking by month is a standard feature in all calorie counting apps.

My Experience
I tested MyFitnessPal for about a month, with the goal of losing half a pound per week over eight weeks, for a total weight loss of four pounds. At five feet, eight inches tall and with a body mass index of 22 (the healthy range for my gender and age is 18 to 25), I'm down the line healthy with no other complications or concerns. Users should always consult with their healthcare professionals before embarking on any kind of fitness program, and a screen warning you to this end appears when you first download the app. You must acknowledge and agree to several statements like these in order to install the MyFitnessPal.

After one month, I lost one pound, which I consider a success. I wasn't extremely strict, but the app made me so much more aware of how much I was eating and when.

I was highly impressed when searching for foods that I cooked at home. One night, I made a Korean dish that is sometimes described as rice cake in spicy red sauce with fishcake. Not only is it difficult to describe in English if you're unfamiliar with Korean cuisine, it also doesn't have a standardized spelling in English (ddeok-boggi, dduk-boggi, ddukbokkie). MyFitnessPal is in English. I really didn't feel like logging a whole recipe that night, so I started searching: "Korean rice spicy" in hopes that something might turn up, and found "Dukboki – Korean Rice Cake in Spicy Sauce." A quick glance at the nutritional facts, and I was sure it was the same dish. The power of the crowd (surely this recipe was a user-uploaded meal) never ceases to amaze me.

The app has more settings that I found very useful (shown in the slideshow), as well as some push notifications, which were a little lackluster. I had been hoping for reminders to eat healthy foods, or motivational messages to help me get through the day. The only push notifications you can set, however, are related to social features (such as "your friend just completed a five-mile run"), and reminders to log meals if you haven't done so by a certain time.

The Best Calorie Counter
MyFitnessPal for iPhone is the best calorie-counter and exercise tracker I've tried, hands down. It keeps the interface slightly simpler and more efficient that other apps'. Fitness apps should function like logs, not daylong data-entry projects, so even the tiniest tweaks for greater efficiency go a long way. MyFitnessPal's food database also rivals all others by including other user-uploaded foods and recipes.

So long as I need to track the calories I'm consuming and burning, I'll do it with MyFitnessPal.

More iPhone App Reviews:




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