My Fitness Pal

Danny and I found a great new FREE app to help us on our journey when on the go. It is called My Fitness Pal. It serves as a food diary, exercise tracker (cardio and weights), and weight tracker to see all of your progress. The fun thing is that you can connect with others through the app so that you can motivate and support one another. Below are several features that we have found helpful, but we have just begun to use it (2 days so far), so I am sure there is even more fun stuff it can do:

• during set-up you input your weight goals and other pertinent information to help determine the target calorie intake
• track your food intake via a diary feature. It allows you to even scan the barcodes of packaged foods for ease of input (we were going scan crazy last night in the kitchen). You just determine the serving size you ate.
• when you complete a day’s entries, it provides a summary page to project the date you will reach your goal based on your progress to date. (cool feature)
• it can graph your diet intake into % fat, protein and carbohydrates and will even show you nutritional content breakdowns that includes cholesterol, sodium, dietary fiber (seen in image above)
• track your water intake
• we haven’t used it yet, but you can insert your exercise broken down by cardio or weights…again, no more paper tracking of your fitness progress. I look forward to using this feature.
• the coolest thing that Danny and I like is that you can put in your own recipes to determine the nutritional content (scan your labels for the ingredients) and then you have them there to add when you eat them.
• You can connect with friends. This serves 2 purposes: you can help motivate and support each other, but what Danny and I like about it is we can shore our food diary. I don’t know about sharing my food diary with the world, but you can set up a password to share your diary with your Fitness Pals, then when Danny and I eat together, only one of us has to input it in our diary and the other can copy it into their diary. This is a very nice feature, especially when it is a complicated meal entry (a salad with lots of stuff in it).

Check out the new app here:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/calorie-counter-diet-tracker/id341232718?mt=8

We will let you know how the app is working out for us as we go. So far, I am having fun figuring out all the neat things it can do…I even scanned my multivitamin. The scanning is really fun. Have a great day and make one better choice. Each little step adds up to great progress.

–Denise

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