App Review MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal is an app I just recently picked up. This app is designed to help you live a healthy lifestyle. It can track macro and micronutrients and good old-fashioned calorie counting. Although there are drawbacks, that I hope the app soon address. It is a well-rounded app. Built with numerous features, it is an app that has become pivotal in improving my life. The app's overall look is seamless and clean, with chucks of the screen taken up by the most essential information, including a swipe function to immediately get a snapshot of your day. It has a tab bar at the bottom to further navigate more detailed information, including food recipes, your daily food logbook, and a menu for your profile settings.

 When setting the app up, you put in your personal biometrics, lifestyle, and goals. After the app calculates the best way to reach your goals, it will make a fitness plan custom tailored to you. This includes your caloric intake, macro and micronutrients, and suggested recipes and workout routines. It sends reminders to track your food throughout the day and updates progress for motivation. Although many would assume you can use it just to lose weight, it can also be used to gain weight and reach your desired body image.

A key feature of the app that offers abundant user simplicity is its use of a barcode scanner. The app can scan any packaging barcode, and it will upload the portion size, all nutrients, and calorie facts to allow the user an accurate daily measurement. This saves the user several hours a week, preventing users from manually calculating, entering, and reviewing the food information.

MyFitnessPal will also calculate calorie burns during daily walking and movement by syncing with an Apple watch. This addition of your daily walking and movement calorie burn further heightens the accuracy of the app's calorie count. If you don't have an Apple watch, it also syncs with Garmin's and Fitbit. Regarding working out, you can manually add workouts you complete in the gym, which also count toward your daily limit or minimum of calories. However, this brings me to my first bit of frustration as someone who lifts weights and wants to track my workouts. The app does not accurately count strength exercises and caloric burn. Some settings on cardio machines are also not available. For instance, on a treadmill, if you jogged at a 3.7 mile per hour speed, the app can only do a 3.5 or 4.0 mile per hour speed, and similar limitations exist in the incline function.

A couple more frustrations is the sleep function within MyFitnessPal. I have followed troubleshooting guides and set it up according to how I was instructed, but it will not gauge my sleep. It cannot accurately catch my REM cycles or overall start and end of sleep rhythms unless I sleep only 5 minutes a night lol. The last bit of irritation in calorie counting is in prepared meals, but the exact ingredients are unknown, such as going to a restaurant or a family cookout. The vast differences in nutrients and calories are astonishing when attempting to enter food for your meal manually. An example would be a cheeseburger, which can have almost a 400 to 600-calorie swing depending on what burger you're eating, and the protein and carbs can vary, too. This can lead to an inaccurate count, but if disciplined and honest, you can still enjoy typical food within your parameters.