Subject: MyFitnessPal 101

Have you ever heard of the app, MyFitnessPal? If not, here’s a crash course on how it works and how you can get started using it today, for free!

MyFitnessPal is a useful tool when it comes to tracking your health and nutrition. It will help you become very aware of how you fuel your body, how many calories are in peanut butter and how little a tablespoon really is ???? It will also help you learn what your calorie intake should be to stay where you are at or if you want to lose some weight.

The app has changed recently so there are more limitations for the free version than there used to be but it’s still a useful tool nonetheless!

➡️ Once you download the app, you need to sign up which you can do with your email or through Facebook. Then, edit your profile through the “more” button, adjust your goals and add your weight and activity level.

If you click back to the home page you might see that you now have a caloric goal at the top. Don’t worry if it doesn’t look like very much right now!

➡️ Go back to the “more” button and back to your goals. Under “nutrition goals” you can adjust your macros and what you’d like your caloric limit to be. Notice, the protein goal is generally quite low. 

Depending on what your goals are, you might want to adjust the percentages . For example, if you are following a keto diet you’d have to drastically increase your fat and protein percentages.

Start with your calories at a reasonable number -- maybe between 1800-2200 calories. You need to test it out for a few days to see how many calories you consume on an average day so don’t worry about that number right off the bat.

➡️ Now’s for the fun part-- tracking your food! The first few times are slow but once you start to repeat foods it will be much quicker because the app remembers everything you enter.

You can either click “diary” and enter your food or the plus sign and get to it that way. To enter your food start typing a food in the search bar or if it has a barcode you can scan it. Don’t forget things like olive oil, cheese, and coffee creamer. It depends how picky you want to be but sometimes those can add up to hundreds of extra calories every day that you are not aware of!

Once you enter your food it will be saved in your history so it’s quicker to add next time.

➡️ Now you’ll see your calories remaining for the day have gone down ???? If you click on the number of calories remaining it will show you a breakdown of your nutrition.

If you only want to track your calories at first, then you can ignore this page. But if you want to be aware of how much protein, carbs, and fat you are taking in, this page is where you will see that.

I would suggest not tracking your fitness in the app because it will give calories back to you and well, it just doesn’t work that way IRL ????

Take time to get to know the app and track your food for a week or so without trying to decrease your calories just so you can see where your neutral zone is.

Then you can start to decrease it slowly, like 50-100 calories per week slowly.

There are other apps out there that do the same thing as MyFitnessPal so if you find one you like better, by all means, give it a shot!

Good luck!

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P.S. Along with nutrition you need to move your body, too. Try a free sample workout of 10 rounds here! (LINK)