MyFitnessPal Review & Rating | PCMag.com

We live in a world of temptation, cheap pleasures, stress, and convenience, all of which can affect our diets and health. Managing weight, whether you want to lose, gain, or maintain it, takes diligence as well as a bit of math. You need to know how many calories you consume and how many you burn. MyFitnessPal is the best calorie-counting app on the market. It has a mobile app and website that connect you to the largest database of foods so that you can easily look up what you eat and record it in the app. At the end of each day, MyFitnessPal gives you insightful feedback that you can actually use to help reach your weight goal. While it’s not a diet program, it can help you make changes you make to your diet by providing nutritional information. MyFitnessPal is an Editors’ Choice among apps for health and fitness.

MyFitnessPal Price: Free vs Premium

MyFitnessPal has a free tier of service, plus a Premium membership. Premium costs $9.99 per month or $49.99 per year.

With a free account, you can track food and calories, activity, weight, and a few other metrics. You don’t get macronutrient information, meaning the breakdown of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins that you consume. You also don’t get other nutritional content. In my estimation, the free version of MyFitnessPal is ideally suited to helping someone maintain their weight after a weight loss program. It’s also perfectly suited to helping people lose weight through calorie counting when they don’t need the help of a program to be successful.

MyFitnessPal Premium eliminates advertisements and adds macronutrient and other nutritional information. It also lets you further customize the app. For example, you can choose to keep your calorie goal fixed despite how many calories you burn during activity. You can set different goals based on the day of the week and have customized calorie intake goals for each meal of the day. With a Premium account, you can export CSV files of your data. You also get exclusive content, like short motivational videos and workout examples.

Price for Other Weight Loss Apps

Compared with other apps for weight loss and calorie counting, MyFitnessPal’s price seems high for the monthly subscription and reasonable for the annual subscription.

Noom has a high list price—$59 per month plus a $20 starter fee—although the amount you pay could be significantly less. When I tested the app, my actual cost for the first six weeks ended up being only $20, and the renewal rate for the following month was $20, as well. The listed annual price is $199.

With Noom, you get food logging, as well as daily readings about the psychology of weight loss. After the first few weeks, you also get put into a group chat with other Noom users who are in a similar place in the program as you. Noom is a dedicated weight loss program whereas MyFitnessPal has more flexible uses.

WeightWatchers Digital costs about $20 per month when you pay monthly. This program comes with an active community and online groups you can join based on topic, such as nurses, veterans, people more than 60 years old, postpartum mothers, vegans, and so forth. WeightWatchers has other programs that include one-on-one coaching or in-person meetings, and those cost more. There are some hidden fees with WW, like a $20 signup fee that’s often (but not always) waived and a $40 fee if you cancel more than one month before your program ends.

The MayoClinic Diet costs $59 per quarter. With the MayoClinic Diet, the only option is to pay quarterly; there’s no month-to-month. It’s a good option if you want detailed meal plans chosen for you. There’s no community or coaching, and it’s web only, no mobile app. The MayoClinic Diet is tough to do if you have specific food requirements, such as vegetarian or kosher, because figuring out substitutions is time consuming.

The Jillian Michaels App is the app to try if your primary goal is to become stronger and more fit, rather than focus on your weight. For $14.99 per month, you get guided workouts alongside calorie counting tools. Another app I like that’s similar to Jillian Michaels is called 8fit, and while it’s pretty good, it’s comparatively expensive at $24.99 per month.

Getting Started With MyFitnessPal

When you first get started with MyFitnessPal, you enter a few pieces of data about yourself: birthdate (for your age), height, weight, whether you’re a sedentary person, and so forth. That’s standard with any weight-management app. It’s goes quickly, though, which is not the case with complete weight-loss programs, like Noom and WeightWatchers. Those types of services can take half an hour to set up, asking about your dietary requirements and bad eating habits you want to break.

Based on the number you enter, MyFitnessPal guesses how many calories your body burns on a typical day with no additional exercise. Next, you tell MyFitnessPal whether you’re trying to lose, maintain, or gain weight, and the app asks how aggressively you want to pursue your goal. You can gain up to one pound per week, or lose up to two pounds per week, but that’s the maximum. You then get a recommended daily calorie goal.

Once you get going with tracking your calories, MyFitnessPal does something unique that’s really helpful. At the end of the day, when you indicate you’re done logging food and activity, it tells you what weight you would be if “every day were like today.” For example, “If every day were like today, you’d weigh 135 pounds by January 1.” In that moment, you know exactly how difficult or easy it was to get through the day. Do you have the wherewithal to make every day like today? Do you even need to based on your goal? This feedback is extremely insightful.

If you skimp too much on calories on any day, you see a warning message instead of this feedback, essentially explaining that if every day were like today, it would be unsustainable and dangerous.

How Does MyFitnessPal Work?

To use MyFitnessPal, you do log everything you eat and drink each day. You can also log activities either manually or by connecting the app to supported fitness app or fitness tracker. The list of options is long and includes all the top players, like Fitbit, Garmin, Polar, Strava, Misfit, Nokia Health Mate, and so on.

When you look for and log the foods you eat, you can adjust the portion size to a fine degree. If you only put one-third of a banana on your plate, it’s simple enough to record that. You can also adjust the serving size to begin with, so half of a large banana doesn’t count the same as half a small one. Often, you can choose grams, cups, ounces. MyFitnessPal makes it easy to find the right measurement estimations for you.

What I like most about MyFitnessPal is its food database. If you search for any food, even in different languages, MyFitnessPal will have something, and in most cases, multiple entries. Every packaged food I’ve ever scanned has turned up, and this includes unusual, small-brand foods made in far flung parts of the world.

Having multiple options means I can decide whether the burrito I ate was closer to a 250-calorie burrito or one with 700 calories. With some other food-logging apps, you don’t have as many options, and that forces you to either live with a bad estimate or manually enter the item or recipe.

Speaking of recipes, MyFitnessPal does have options for entering your own recipes. For example, if you want the most accurate representation of the scones you made, you enter all the ingredients and the number of portions you made, and MyFitnessPal does the rest. You can keep your recipe private or add to the public database. You can also import recipes from websites by dropping a URL into a field on the recipe page. I haven’t seen any other calorie-counting app offer that feature to date.

My Experience With MyFitnessPal

Since 2011, I’ve used MyFitnessPal on and off multiple times. In this most recent run, I tracked my weight and calorie intake for five weeks, although I didn’t record every day perfectly. Every time I’ve picked up MyFitnessPal, a few digits fall off the scale. Restricting intake and counting calories has been shown to lead to weight loss, at least temporarily, with a regaining of the weight just as predictable.

This time around, I used MyFitnessPal to log and watch my eating habits while I simultaneously followed a weight-loss program, Noom. I lost about four pounds. The nice thing was I got added value from MyFitnessPal in the form of nutritional information. Noom doesn’t calculate your macronutrient balance or the quantity of other nutrients you consume, but MyFitnessPal Premium does. So I was able to follow the Noom program while also keeping an eye on my protein intake using MyFitnessPal.

While I was testing the app, a big refresh of the mobile app design debuted, which was a welcome change. The MyFitnessPal website still has a dated look to it, although that shouldn’t stand in your way of using it. It’s easier and faster to log calories with the web app than the mobile app. Plus, if you suddenly remember you need to log a meal while you’re working on a laptop, you can pop on over to the website and tap it in quickly, rather than distract yourself with a second device.

Within the app, you can join challenges and programs, but they aren’t anything like the dieting programs you get with WeightWatchers, Noom, or the MayoClinic Diet. All those programs work to help you change your relationship to food and manage not only how many calories you eat, but what kinds of foods, too. With MyFitnessPal, you get tools for measuring those things, but there is no overarching program to guide you to do it in a certain way.

Recipes, Blog Content, and Community

MyFitnessPal does have more to explore, though none of it is central to the calorie-counting experience. For example, when you upgrade to Premium, you start to see featured videos with short workout summaries (two or three minutes long) or that contain inspirational interviews. You can also find articles about healthy living and video recipes. It’s pretty run-of-the-mill. After poking around at a few articles and videos, I saw little reason to return to this content.

There’s also a community of MyFitnessPal members who chat on forums. You can chat with people about success stories, swap recipes, and what not. In my opinion, the interaction here isn’t as engaging as what you might find on WeightWatchers, which has an active community of people from all walks of life sharing their stories. Noom has a community element, too, although in that case, you’re assigned to a support group of people based on having started the program at a similar time. Your Noom group could be hit or miss. The WeightWatchers groups function on an opt-in basis, so you get to choose.

Canceling or Changing Your Plan

With MyFitnessPal, everything pertaining to the Premium account is self-service. You can get a free trial to the Premium account, and I recommend doing it through the Apple App Store or Google Play if you want the easiest way to manage the subscription.

Best Free Calorie Counting App

MyFitnessPal isn’t a weight loss program, but you can use it to help with weight loss if that’s your goal. It’s one of the easiest calorie-counting apps to use, and the Premium version gives you useful information about nutrition. Because it has both a website and mobile apps (not all calorie-counting apps do), you can log your intake easily when it crosses your mind. Activity-logging is just as easy, too, with so many compatible apps and devices.

For its ease of use and flexibility in letting you customize your weight goal, MyFitnessPal is an Editors’ Choice. If you’re looking for a more traditional dieting program, you’re better off with Noom, WeightWatchers Digital, or a service that offers more in the way of guidance and coaching.