Table of Contents
About MyFitnessPal
You know about the MyFitnessPal app. You’ve seen the Jacked Jimmies and Tammy Thickies tracking their meals and wondered if you could do that. But in an industry full of food trackers and other fitness applications, what makes this one stand out?
There’s got to be a reason why this brand has attracted over 1.5 million Facebook followers and 353k Instagram followers. The leading resource in food tracking, this app has been at the top of the industry for a few years now and has worked hard to perfect its craft.
If you are looking to get your diet on point, then my MyFitnessPal review is for you. Here, I’ll cut through the noise and give you all the information you need to decide if you should add this app to your phone.
Why You Should Trust Us
Our mission is to help you make better, more informed purchase decisions. Our team spends hours researching, consulting with medical experts, gathering insight from expert professionals, reviewing customer feedback, and analyzing products to provide you with the information you need.
Overview of MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal was among the first nutrition trackers when it debuted in 2005. It took what many fitness enthusiasts had been doing for years, manually weighing and tracking their food into notepads, and made it into an app.
The app has only grown more legs as it’s evolved over time. It added more quality-of-life improvements, a paid premium service, and an ever-expanding database of user-generated foods.
The thing is, you’ve likely already heard about MyFitnessPal and know the gist of it. You just download it, enter what you eat, and you’re set to change your habits, right? Well, not exactly. MyFitnessPal is a digital notebook that records what you eat, albeit with more functionality than a real-life notebook, but it doesn’t tell you what to do or how to do it.
I’ll explain that more in the next section of my MyFitnessPal review after telling you about the app’s highlights.
Highlights
- App that tracks diet and exercise goals
- Compatible with more than 50 other apps
- Free service is generous
- Paid service with more features
- Over 14 million food items in their database
- One of the longest-running fitness apps of all time
- Can tailor your goals to lose, gain, or maintain weight
MyFitnessPal Features Review
MyFitnessPal has come a long way over the past decade. When it first debuted in 2005 it was a shell of what it would become. What I mean is that it had its main feature of tracking food but that was about it. It lacked a database for commercial foods or restaurant foods, you couldn’t add your own foods, and you couldn’t save recipes. Geez, 2005 was a bleak year.
But the brand has come a long way since then, adding countless features that make your diet tracking and fitness planning easier. Here are some of its current standout features:
- A food diary that tracks foods by calories, macronutrients, vitamins, and minerals.
- A database with over 14 million food items.
- The ability to add your own custom foods.
- A recipe creator that can save the nutrition and the cooking process of your meals.
These are all more robust tools that you can use to get accurate readings of the food you’re eating.
The premium version of MyFitnessPal has more than enough features that would entice you to spend the extra money every month, including:
- Lack of ads.
- Can track macronutrients and set custom targets.
- Study food trends through the app’s algorithm.
- Add macronutrient logs to meals if you need to account for extra macros.
- Vary goals by day.
- Exercise tracking.
- Calorie and macro breakdown by meal (rather than on a day-to-day basis).
- Food timestamps.
- Net carbs (essential for those following a keto diet).
MyFitnessPal can also sync up with services like your Apple Watch or the Health app on your phone to draw information from there and put it all in one place.
MyFitnessPal App
One of the handiest things about MyFitnessPal is that it’s available on the go. Everyone likes to eat out, so it’s handy that you track your meals with you wherever you go. The app is available on both Android and Apple devices.
The desktop version of MyFitnessPal is easy to use as well. You can transfer your data between the desktop and mobile versions too.
How Does MyFitnessPal Work
I’ll use this section of my MyFitnessPal review to outline how the app works at its most basic level. You start by entering your desired caloric intake per day. If you don’t know then you can tell MyFitnessPal your goals and current measurements and they’ll give you a rough estimate of how many calories you should be eating.
From there, you enter all the food you eat into the app. You can enter it by weight, measurement, or serving. MyFitnessPal takes a hands-off approach to coaching, meaning it doesn’t coach at all. If you want to adjust your goals over time then it’s up to you to modify them.
MyFitnessPal Cost
If you’re a penny pincher and reading my MyFitnessPal review then you’ll be happy to see this. The app is still good even if you don’t want to pay a cent! It’s a solid tool to track your food intake.
That being said, for only $20 per month or $80 per year, you can reap the full benefits of the app. These are for those who want the absolute most out of it. They’re by no means essential but they can make your fitness journey easier.
Is MyFitnessPal Good For Weight Loss?
There’s an old saying that goes, “what gets measured gets managed.” If you apply it to MyFitnessPal then yes, MyFitnessPal is good for weight loss. Most people have no clue how many calories they’re actually eating, which makes it hard when you want to make a healthy change.
However, by keeping track of how many calories you’re eating, you can learn more about yourself and your body. Combine this with MyFitnessPal’s weight tracker and progress photo functions, and it can be a good tool to document your weight loss.
The thing is, by itself, MyFitnessPal is just a tool. It will ultimately be up to you to use it to lead a healthier life. Overall, the app is suitable for weight loss.
Who Is MyFitnessPal For?
MyFitnessPal is for anyone who wants to get a better idea of what they eat and track it easily on the go.
MyFitnessPal Reviews: What Do Customers Think?
To get a good understanding of what using the app is really like, here are a few MyFitessPal review scores from across the internet:
- App Store: 4.7/5 stars from more than 1.5 million reviews
- Google Play Store: 4.2/5 stars after more than 2 million reviews
- Sitejabber: 3.5/5 stars after 30 reviews
Something that many positive MyFitnessPal reviews stated was that you didn’t need to buy the premium version to get results. If you were trying to change your lifestyle, then just the free app would be enough to get you going.
“I started using this app seriously in mid-July. The database for foods is great and I up until recently just used the free version. During this time I lost 11 lbs,” wrote one customer on the App Store.
Other reviewers mentioned that the app was great but that the people on it weren’t. That’s to say that some people didn’t correctly add food to the public database meaning that their measurements could lead others astray if they weren’t careful.
Here’s what one user wrote about that: “I’ve installed this app some time ago and I can really recommend it to those who want to control your meals and provide a healthy life. The only thing is that the items are loaded mostly by other users and it’s better to check the information given about calories in them.”
The app’s recent changes to the free version have pushed away some customers, with an increase in ads and some features being taken away from the free version. However, these main complaints aside, there were still many satisfied users.
It’s best summed up by this user: “Again, for a free app, it does the job. My only warning would be to carefully monitor the calories/nutritional information members add.”
So if you are careful with what you enter, and you should be since you are tracking your food, then there should be no major issues in using this app. With such a large database and a long experience in the fitness industry, MyFitnessPal seems to have a great reputation among its users.
Is MyFitnessPal Legit?
Despite its insistence on pushing users to the premium app, I think that MyFitnessPal is still legit.
Is MyFitnessPal Worth It?
Allow me to nerd out for a second. I’ve used a variety of different food-tracking apps, so I’m confident I can give you a solid recommendation at the end of my MyFitnessPal review.
In short, it’s worth it but it’s not the best option. Recent changes to features that were previously available in the free version have hurt the app’s functionality. Plus, it’s not great for accounting for human error. People make mistakes when adding food to their database, meaning that what you think you’re eating may have more or fewer calories than you think.
The other issue is that MyFitnessPal’s algorithm isn’t awesome for working out discrepancies between macronutrients and calories (told you I was going to get nerdy).
I read tons of questions from users who were confused as to how they had some calories left over for the day when they ate all their intended macronutrients, and scientifically that shouldn’t happen. That issue only happened with MyFitnessPal.
There’s also the hold-up with people tracking the calories they burned during exercise, a science that doesn’t work out as well as you’d hope. It’s surprisingly hard to identify how many calories you burned per exercise session and that difficulty can snowball into a mess when you try to think about whether you’ve burned enough or eaten enough.
Was that a lot of nitpicking? Yes, and if you made it through that then you’re a soldier. Simply put, there are better apps out there, but many of them are locked behind a paywall. If you want a free app to track what you eat then you’ll be fine with MyFitnessPal.
MyFitnessPal Promotions & Discounts
I couldn’t find any promotions or discounts at the time of writing my MyFitnessPal review.
How To Get Started on MyFitnessPal
You can download the app on Google Play or Apple App Store.
FAQ
Who owns MyFitnessPal?
Under Armour owns MyFitnessPal.
What is MyFitnessPal’s Privacy Policy?
They will not sell your information to third parties.
What is MyFitnessPal’s Refund Policy?
They do not issue refunds so you’ll be locked into your membership until it runs out.
How to Contact MyFitnessPal
You can contact them by chatting with their team on their website.
Check out some of our recently published articles you might like:
Ask the community or leave a comment
WRITE A REVIEWCustomer Reviews
Leave a review