MyFitnessPal - Initial Impression

So I'm trying out MyFitnessPal... endorsed by pretty much every weight-loss blog I've come across. I don't know how effective it will be, but it's been a good motivator so far. Here are my favorite tidbits:

- their database of foods is incredible! I haven't been let down yet, even with health food brands and smaller chain restaurants.

- they have a recipe maker, that calculates what a homemade dish's stats are, and you can save them for later use

- when you are done entering your food intake for the day, it projects what you will weigh in 5 weeks if you ate that day's food every day for 5 weeks (makes you feel good about your food choices!)

- you can log things like "cleaning vigorously" though I think people milk that a little. I doubt when you log 90 minutes of cleaning you're actually burning 600 calories :P


Here's a sample day, granted it isn't a good day by any means! I ate dinner at my Nana's house, so that made for a lot of "homemade" eats, and I didn't have breakfast (tsk tsk) because I ran out of milk and creamer simultaneously, which meant that I didn't wake up or have cereal :P

Things that bum me out are:


- their workout library is ok, but lacking in the yoga department

- they tell you that you can eat more if you work out more (it adds on the number of calories you've burned to the number you can eat in a day) which seems counter-productive to me

But all in all, it's helping me keep track of my food intake in a really easy, free way and I've used it mainly to glance at how I'm doing come dinnertime, which is undoubtably my largest meal of the day.

... and I chose tea tonight instead of another snack because I'd already "closed my log" for today. So it's helping already!


But they have a lot of graphing features, so once I've logged a lot and start losing weight I can see nifty charts and such of my progress. I'm all about nifty tools for encouragement, so this one is getting my vote!

- Mo