MyFitnessPal is a calorie tracking and meal planning app with over 200 million users worldwide, used primarily as an extremely useful and effective weight loss tool.
But it MyFitnessPal right for you? And is it worth upgrading to the premium version?
MyFitnessPal is perfect for fitness enthusiasts wanting to track and gain insight into their consumption of calories, as well as have better planning and control over their day to day eating. However, MyFitnessPal can be a lot of upkeep and may not be the right fit in an ongoing capacity.
We downloaded MyFitnessPal, got stuck into the nuts and bolts of it’s functionality and will today be providing an in-depth review of the app, as well helping you decide whether it’s worth upgrading to premium.
Let’s dive in.
Open Table of Contents
About Calorie Tracking Apps
Losing weight and keeping it off is certainly an incredible challenge for so many of us.
Perhaps you’ve tried a bunch of diets in the past but simply struggle to stick with it for more than a few weeks.
And now, you’ve discovered MyFitnessPal.
But what makes it any different from the weight loss programs or diets you’ve already tried?
MyFitnessPal is a calorie tracking app, meaning, it helps you record, track and manage the number of carbohydrates, fats and protein that you are eating on a daily basis, giving you important education around your energy balance.
Energy balance refers to the balance of calories you consume (eat) versus the calories your body uses.
If your goal is a weight loss, being in a calorie deficit (eat fewer calories than you use), will result in weight loss.
Yes, it’s that simple.
It’s important to keep in mind that MyFitnessPal isn’t actually a diet in itself, rather, it can help you to understand the energy contained within the food you are eating.
In my opinion, MyFitnessPal is more effective when used in conjunction with some sort of diet approach or plan, however, it can still give you valuable insight if you simply just start recording your already existing eating habits.
My Experience with MyFitnessPal
I have been an avid user of MyFitnessPal for as long as I can remember.
It has always been a staple part of my daily phone usage and helped me and my clients gain and lose hundreds of kilograms over the years.
Whether I am using it to try and get myself back in the zone mentally or I am training hard leading up to a competition, MyFitnessPal has been a part of my routine for many years.
Most recently I used MyFitnessPal during my weight-loss journey from January to May 2021.
At the end of 2020 I found myself 125.1kg – overweight, unmotivated and needing a shift. So I decided to set myself a goal to lose 20kg.
I understood that in its simplest form, weight loss is simple equation of calories consumed vs calories burnt. Or how much I was eating vs how much I was exercising. So I signed up to my local F45 and re-logged in to MyFitnessPal and committed to tracking my food every day.
MyFitnessPal is incredibly easy to use. The simple ‘add’ and barcode scanning functions made inputting new food effortless and apps ability to recall your recent meals made tracking the my food everyday an absolute breeze.
You can use MyFitnessPal to estimate how much chicken breast was in the wrap you had at lunch or count every gram of chocolate you snuck after dinner. It helps you keep keen a measured eye on your diet, water consumption and exercise levels, allowing you to make well informed, critical decisions about your health and wellbeing.
I can honestly say that adding MyFitnessPal to my arsenal of tools was an important factor in my weight loss journey and helped me lose a total of 26kg.
I found that although MyFitnessPal may not be able to give you one hundred percent accurate measures of calories or macro nutrients for every single meal that I ate, it certainly gives you a solid guide of how much you’re actually eating.
Not only did MyFitnessPal act as a food tracker, but the accurate breakdown of macronutrients in your food provided me with a valuable education on what exactly is in the food I was eating allowing me to make more informed, critical decisions about my diet, health and fitness.
About the MyFitnessPal Brand
MyFitnessPal is a popular health and fitness application centered around their simple and easy to use food diary, amassing over 20 million users as of 2020.
The app was founded in 2005 by Mike Lee starting out as a basic desktop spreadsheet used to help him and his wife count their calorie consumption in preparation for their upcoming beach wedding.
The app became so valuable that well-known fitness brand – Under Armour – acquired it in 2015 for an sizable $475 million dollars.
After years of refinement and development, no one could have predicted the insane success of MyFitnessPal – an application that has seen widespread, market-leading success in the industry.
How to Use MyFitnessPal
When you first download MyFitnessPal you will be guided through a series of basic questions to help you get started.
- Age
- Height
- Weight
- Activity Level
- Goals (Gain, lose or maintain weight)
It then spits out an estimated calorie goal for your specific situation.
Home Page
MyFitnessPal opens on the home page, showing you a news feed for everything going on in the MyFitnessPal community.
Plastering at the top of the page is your daily calorie goal to help keep you on track. You’ll also find helpful blogs and updates from your friends and other social connections who are also using the app.
Diary Tab
The Diary Tab is found at the bottom of the homepage.
This tab takes you to a simple food diary page, breaking your day into breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks and exercise, with your calorie goal painted still visible across the top.
Simply click ‘add food’ and you will be met with a search bar where you can find a database of 11 million foods.
Alternatively, you can simply use the scanning function to scan the barcode on your food packaging and within seconds it will deliver you with an in depth nutrient breakdown of your meal and serving sizes before allowing your to add it to your daily total.
An additional bonus to the diary tab is that once you have entered a meal/food once, it goes to your recent history, allowing you to quickly add it to your diary on following days rather than searching it again.
Progress Tab
The progress tab is simply used to keep a consistent record of how your body changes over time. By simply pressing the ‘+’ button in the top right corner you will be met by a page where you can input your current weight, the date and a progress photo.
Once completed it is then logged at the bottom of the progress page.
This is an excellent function as it allows you to monitor the peaks and troughs in your progress over weeks, months and years rather than just a few days.
This allows you to more accurately manage your health, weight and fitness and monitor whether the changes you are making to your diet and routine are having a positive or negative impact on your journey towards your goals.
More Tab
The More Tab will help you find everything else you are looking for.
Recipes, workouts, helpful blogs, the ability to pair different devices to help track your activity levels and even count your steps and even a friends tab where you can search and add your friends and family and watch each others progress as an extra level of accountability.
However, the function in the “More Tab’ that we found most compelling was the “Nutrition’ section.
The Nutrition section breaks down your daily food intake into calories (energy total), macronutrients (proteins, carbohydrates and fats).
This is important as it allows you to not only see the total amount of food/calories you are but a more accurate breakdown of your diet.
Losing weight is a simple equation of consuming less calories than you are burning.
However, in order to grow lean muscle or lose fat specifically you will need to monitor the amount of protein – the building blocks of muscle tissue – that you are consuming in order to grow and repair muscle tissue.
As well as managing the amount of carbohydrates, fats and sugars you are consuming to prevent yourself from consuming excessive amounts and possibly storing it on your body.
Is MyFitnessPal Free?
MyFitnessPal is free to download, sign up and use for basic functionality, such as nutrition tracking.
However, if you want to use their premium features, such as meal scanning, you’ll need to upgrade to a premium subscription.
MyFitnessPal also gives you the ability to try their premium subscription for 30 days free of charge, however, make sure you cancel within this time period if you don’t want to get charged.
How Much is MyFitnessPal Premium?
A MyFitnessPal premium subscription costs between $4.16 USD and $9.99 USD per month, with the price dependent on how long you commit to upgrading for.
A MyFitnessPal month to month subscription costs $9.99 USD per month.
A MyFitnessPal annual membership costs $49.99 USD upfront, which works out to be $4.16 USD per month (58% saving).
MyFitnessPal Free Vs. Premium
MyFitnessPal claim that premium members are 65% more likely to reach their weight loss goal.
But with so many useful features available to you in the free version of MyFitnessPal, you may be asking yourself – is it even worth upgrading?
Here are the main differences, according to MyFitnessPal:
| Free | Premium | |
| Nutrition Tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Meal Scan | ✓ | |
| Customisable Carbs, Protein & Fat Goals | ✓ | |
| Guided Fitness & Nutrition Plans | ✓ | |
| Custom Home Screen Dashboard | ✓ | |
| Food Analysis & Insights | ✓ | |
| Meals & Recipes | ✓ | |
| Ad Free Experience | ✓ | |
| Subtract Exercise Calories | ✓ | |
| Quick-Add Carbs, Fat & Protein | ✓ | |
| Spreadsheet Exporting | ✓ |
By looking at this table, it seems as though the functionality of a free membership is very limited.
However, after years of experience using the app, I personally find this not to be the case.
During my 26 kg weight loss journey, I only ever used the free version of MyFitnessPal.
However, here are two premium features we really liked that may make it worth the upgrade:
- Meal Scanning
- Customisable macronutrients
| MyFitnessPal Meal Scan
The MyFitnessPal meal scan feature allows you to hover your camera over a type of food and MyFitnessPal will quickly identify what it is. This feature is not to be confused with the barcode scanner.
This is a great addition if you want to scan individual foods, such as a glass of water or an apple, however, if you have a meal that has multiple food groups mixed up, the meal scanner isn’t very effective.
| Customisable Macronutrients
Perhaps the other feature of Premium that’s worth upgrading for is having the ability to customise how many grams of each macronutrient you’re trying to hit for the day.
In the free version, you can only allocate a percentage of your total calories for the day, rather than a gram by gram breakdown, which may be limiting for some advanced users.
Is MyFitnessPal Accurate?
There has been some skepticism around the accuracy of MyFitnessPal’s database, due to the fact that anyone using the app can upload recipes and meals to the database.
Apps such as Cronometer combat this by only allowing trusted sources of information to add to their nutrition database, which may be a better alternative if this is an important factor for you.
In saying this, MyFitnessPal is extremely accurate for base ingredients, such as brown rice, fruits and vegetables, however, it is not very accurate if you choose custom meals e.g. homemade chicken curry or Pub Parma that have been created by other MyFitnessPal users.
We recommend creating your own custom meals by adding up all of the individual ingredients so that you get the most accurate representation of what you’re actually eating.
Is MyFitnessPal Effective?
At the end of the day, the reason why we use fitness apps is because we want to see results.
So, is using MyFitness to track your macronutrients and calories going to help you get results?
MyFitnessPal is an extremely effective way to lose weight, so long as you accurately input your information to begin with and input the correct foods, quantities and weights. It’s also going to effectively educate you around the energy found within the foods you eat.
We highly recommend MyFitnessPal if you want to see results.
MyFitnessPal Positives
Easy To Use
MyFitnessPal is incredibly easy to use. Within just a few minutes of playing around you have access to tracking and a database of foods.
Free Version is Great
The free version of MyFitnessPal will give 95% of people more than enough functionality to adequately track their nutrition in order to see weight loss results.
Covers A Lot Of Bases
MyFitnessPal is not just a calorie tracking application.
It has educational tools, exercise tracking and you can connect with your friends and hook up your watch to count your steps.
Limitations of MyFitnessPal
Workouts/Food Plans Seem Like An Afterthought
Although it is amazing how MyFitnessPal is able to integrate so many different helpful tools into one easy to use platform, they could do more to promote healthy food and exercise options rather then hiding them on the ‘More’ tab.
No Basic Tutorials
Although MyFitnessPal is fairly intuitive for most people, when I have consulted with some of my older and less tech savvy clients they have still struggled to set up and figure out how to use the app.
A basic set of tutorials breaking down the app functions, the importance of keeping a diary and basic information around the function and importance of macronutrients would go a long way to maximize the impact and adherence to using MyFitnessPal consistently.
Time Consuming
Tracking your calories with MyFitnessPal can certainly be time consuming and monotonous, which can have many people giving up within a few weeks.
Our Final Thoughts
MyFitnessPal is truely amazing.
As a mere food tracking application it is outstanding value – but there is so much more it has to offer.
MyFitnessPal is a database of 11 million food/meal options, a community of 200 million people to connect withand it gives you countless recipe and workout ideas.
Whether you are trying to lose weight, gain weight or just trying to make better decisions about what you eat, MyFitnessPal is am amazing tool to have in your back pocket.
FAQ
How Do I Delete MyFitnessPal Account?
Deleting your MyFitnessPal account is straightforward and achieved through your device’s settings.
If you are using an Apple device, follow these steps:
- Go to settings.
- Click your profile at the top of the screen.
- Click Subscriptions
- Click MyFitnessPal
- Click Cancel Subscription/Free Trial
If you are using an Android device, follow these steps:
- Go to the Play Store.
- Click your profile at the top right corner of the screen.
- Click ‘Manage your Google account’.
- Click Payments and subscriptions.
- Click MyFitnessPal
- Follow the prompts.
