MyFitnessPal Description, How to Use and Download Links

What is My Fitness Pal?

MyFitnessPal is a website and mobile app that allows you to input your weight, your activity level and your goal weight. You decide what weight you want to be and how long you want to take to get there. My Fitness Pal calculates how many calories you should consume every day. 

It works as a food tracker. You input the foods that you eat throughout the day and the app tells you how many calories you've eaten. By sticking to the allocated daily calorie goals, you can achieve the weight that you want within a specified period of time. 

SA Spotters recommends this product as a must-have for anybody wanting to lose weight or gain weight.

Download links

• On your desktop (laptop or computer), you can create an account for free and start using it here:  www.myfitnesspal.com

• You can search for 'MyFitnessPal' on any mobile app store  

• Download it here from the Google Play Store.

• You can download it from The Apple App store here.

• Download the app to your iPhone, iPad or Android device directly from the MyFitnessPal website here.

My Fitness Pal for weight loss

As a personal trainer, I recommend that almost all of my clients download the My Fitness Pal app and implement it into their daily lives. Two things directly impact weight loss:

• How many calories do you burn per day? 
• What is the amount of calories that you consume each day?

Increase the amount of calories that you burn per day

To lose weight consistently, you need to burn more calories than what you take in. Exercise burns a lot of calories (see how many calories each exercise burns here). Exercise also increases your metabolism. This increases the rate at which your body naturally burns calories throughout the day. The higher you metabolism, the more calories you can consume and still love weight. This is why exercise is such a great way to lose body fat.

Decrease the amount of calories that you consume per day

The fewer the calories you eat, the more calories your body needs to get from stored fat. If you restrict your caloric intake too much, you risk lowering your metabolism. This will decrease the amount of calories that your body burns on its own. My Fitness Pal is a simple and easy great way to ensure that you don't eat too much and lose weight, but still enough to keep you going.

My Fitness Pal for weight gain and muscle gain

For people who can't put on weight

Using this app is one of my favorite techniques for helping people to gain weight. In one example, I have people tell me that they can't put on a single kilogram of body weight. They say that they eat more than anybody that they know of - but they are still the skinniest of them all.

This is because of a fast metabolism. Their bodies burn calories very quickly, and turn to body mass as soon as there is no more food to burn for energy. MyFitnessPal will calculate how many calories you should be eating. It is easier to stick to the required number of calories consumed when you have an exact number to aim for.

After using this app, many people are shocked at how little they are eating, compared to the amount that they should be. As a skinny person, there is a 90% chance that you are eating much less than you think you are.

For people who want to build muscle

Muscles take a lot more nutrients to grow than fat does. Your muscles also need the right kind of nutrients. The more you exercise, the more you need to increase your nutrient intake to facilitate muscle growth.

The exact number can be hard to calculate on your own. Eat too much and you gain more fat than muscle. Eat too little and your muscles won't grow as quickly as they could. MFP takes the guesswork out it from the calories side of things. This reduces your burden to determining what foods to eat, instead of how much. If you want to bulk up, this is how you make a bulking meal plan.

The only missing elements (besides rest and sleep) will be your exercise regime. Follow this workout program if you haven't been to the gym before or in a long time. Follow this one if you are an experienced gym goer who needs to take things to the next level.

Is MyFitnessPal free?

MyFitnessPal is free to use. You can input your goals, track the foods that you eat and monitor your progress without spending a penny. The app makes money by showing ads and providing advanced tools to premium members. Premium membership removes ads.

Additional information about MyFitnessPal

Now that we've covered the basics, here is some extra information that you might need before using this app to reach your weight goals.

A step-by-step tutorial on how to use My Fitness Pal

If you would like to see a detailed 'what does it look like' guide, complete with screen shots and videos, I highly recommend that you check out this guide on using My Fitness Pal from www.thebewitchinkitchen.com. Randa Derkson beautifully walks you through all of its functions. She includes screen shots and videos for the best illustration. She tells us that this is her favorite app of them all on her smartphone.

As Randa explains, you can also log exercises and calories burned. You can track the amount of protein, fat and carbohydrates that you've eaten. There is an interactive, lively social media aspect to it so that you can motivate others while sharing your accomplishments with the world. Workouts and diary entries are shared to your news feed for your friends and family to see. Social inclusion is a great way to stay motivated!

MyFitnessPal for a Keto diet

If you want to use the app to help you with a keto diet, Keto Size Me has a great guide for this specific purpose. Shasta Walton, the author of this guide, explains that the only issue is that the app only works within 5% increments when it comes to working out your fat, protein and carbohydrate amounts. She recommends that you still write down these numbers in addition to using the app. This will make sure that you stay within the right ketogenic limits.

She says that is will help you to plan your meals in advance with much less guesswork than before. Since MFP has cataloged over 2 million different types of foods and brands, it is easier for you to keep track of your micro nutrient intake - even when you can't find the nutritional information on the food label or lost the packaging.

You can search their food database and add foods that you will be eating in the near future. This step isn't necessary, but makes it super-fast. This helps you when you want to log a meal in a hurry. Simply go to 'recent' or 'frequent'. This reduces search time - and time is the most valuable resource of them all.

Using My Fitness Pal to calculate the nutritional quality of home-cooked meals

Tammy from Organize Yourself Skinny (www.organizeyourselfskinny.com) shows how you can use this app to calculate the nutritional information of every meal that you make. Doing so is not only handy for people who make recipes on a commercial level. It is also great to control calories while improving the health of the family that you cook for. It may even be for you. How many extra calories does that olive oil really add to your meal? Now you know for sure.

Her step-by-step tutorial makes it so simple that you can do it for every single meal that you put together. Now it's not only the 'processed foods' with predetermined nutrition labels that we hold ourselves accountable for, but literally every meal that goes into our mouth.

Once the new recipe is logged, My Fitness Pal saves the data so that you can refer to it again in the future. She also says that you can easily reduce the amount of calories for each meal by simply increasing the amount of servings that you take from that recipe.

Help with setting realistic weight goals

Jared from Tone and Tighten said that one of his top 10 reasons why he loves this app is because it helps us to set realistic goals. It is so easy to aim too high, fail miserably and return to our previous patterns - all in under a week.

We assume that the more effort something takes, the larger our chances of success will be. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. The more effort something takes, the lesser the changes are that we will stick to it. This is especially true if the change involves choice i.e. we need to make the right choice over and over again.

MyFitnessPal helps us to break our goals down into easy-to-do steps. Monitor the amount of calories that you eat in a day. Do this for a few weeks to get a good overall idea of your eating habits. To change your lifestyle and eating habits, simply move the bar up or down by 200 calories. This seemingly small change will be easier to do. Small changes will make your goal much more achievable.

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