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Nutrition Tracking with MyFitnessPal

As I mentioned in my September review, I’ve been using MyFitnessPal.com diligently for almost a month now. It has been a really eye-opening experience and another motivator for my weight loss journey.

Screenshot showing typical food entries

Adding it All Up

The principle is pretty simple: Create a free profile, log into the website, and enter each and every item of food that you eat and every exercise that you do. This sounds really hard, but it gets much easier after the first day. On the first day I took photos of all my food and the nutrition labels so that I could enter the nutrition info. I usually have the same breakfast and lunch almost every day, so after entering the detailed information once, I can just use the “copy meal from yesterday” feature.  And even if that food item doesn’t have a label, you can search MyFitnessPal’s extensive foods database for something that is similar. Similarly there is is a tab for exercise where you enter your exercise activities.

The most valuable part of this experience is learning the nutritional breakdown of foods and my meals. I was shocked at how many calories were in certain foods like cannelloni. And I’m pleasantly surprised that some foods, especially vegetables are all but hollow in terms of calories.

Using this website has also been a good motivator to exercise. If I do an extra walk or such, it counts as “extra” calories for the day, so I can think of banking those towards weight loss, or splurge on food a bit. So walking between the subway station to work and back is an extra 150 calories burned, or another piece of fish!

Screenshot of MyFitnessPal homepage showing newsfeed and update of calories in/out

Setting Goals

Adding up calories and grams of protein is great, but only really useful in reference to a target or goal. Fortunately, there is the ability to add your own goals and adjust your goal ratio of carbs-fat-protein.

The protein target of about 150g was given to me by my trainer. Chasing protein has been my primary challenge for the last month or so. The hardest part is getting protein without too many calories. I don’t think highly of the notion of low-carb diets, but chasing these high-protein sources has made me shed some high carbohydrates foods in favour of high-protein items.  I’ve had fun hunting for foods that have great protein-calorie ratios and good amounts of polyunsaturated fats. I’ll share those in another post (spoiler: Turkey and seafood ftw). And surprisingly, focusing on these protein and good fat rich foods has meant that I don’t feel hungry.

My calorie and macronutrient goals

For a while I had set my daily calorie goals to 1764. The fancy body fat analysis scale at the gym said that 1764 kCal was my Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). But even on days that I exceeded that, MyFitnessPal said I was still losing weight, so I was a little confused. And, that number seems brutally low. I used this calculator on Bodybuilding.com to calculate my RMR which is apparently a better target for minimum calories. Based on that I’ve re-set my calorie goal to 2044.

The one complaint I have about this feature is that the targets get all screwed up when I add exercise to a day, which is prettymuch every day. For example, if I did 500 calories of exercise, MyFitnessPal assumes that about a third of those extra calories should be through protein, ratcheting up my protein target for the day by about a dozen more. This can be avoided by using their “premium” service which is $49.99 USD per year, and I’m getting tempted to upgrade. The “Premium” service removes the advertisements too, which might be really nice.

Plus or Minus

Obviously, this whole process isn’t 100% accurate. There is probably significant uncertainty or inaccuracy in the the entries I’m making base on calories consumed or burned, quantities consumed, and the accuracy of nutritional information.

Nutrition tracking programs like this are dependent on quantities and volumes of foods eaten to calculate calories and other macromolecules  I may not be having exactly 250mL of milk with breakfast. And that may not be exactly 100g of turkey.

And the exact nutrition information is hit and miss too. Nutrition labels are handy, and many restaurants post nutrtion information of their foods on their website. But I’ve been told that the advertised nutrition is not always exactly accurate. Similarly, sometimes I pick a “generic” version of the food from MyFitnessPal’s extensive database. But who’s to say that the “generic apple” I chose from the database really reflects the apple I had for a snack?

But, overall I’m very happy with this website and I plan to keep using it for a while. I may take a break now and then, especially on vacation, but I can see that tracking like this is good motivation to say no to that piece of cake at work or making sure I get that walk or run in!