We live in a world of temptation, cheap pleasures, stress, and convenience, all of which affect diet 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 one of the best calorie-counting apps, although a higher price for the Premium version and fewer free features make it a bit less compelling than it once was. It's still excellent for logging food and exercise and calculating how many calories you have left to consume at any point during the day to reach your goal. Don't confuse MyFitnessPal for a workout app, however, or even a weight-loss program. Instead, it's tightly focused on calories.
How Much Does MyFitnessPal Cost?
MyFitnessPal has a free tier of service and a Premium membership. Premium costs $19.99 per month or $79.99 per year, which is high. Just a few years ago, the monthly cost was half that. Prices vary based on the country you’re in, however, so you can expect lower fees outside of the United States.
With a free account, you can track food, calories, activity, weight, and a few other metrics. You won't get information about how eating a specific food at a certain time can affect your energy levels or your progress toward your weight goals. The biggest change to the free account is that it no longer includes the barcode scanner—you use your phone camera to scan a barcode on any packaged food quickly, and it captures the nutritional information. It works all around the world fairly well, and it used to be included with a free account but is behind the paywall now. A representative for MyFitnessPal said some users outside the US who had created a free account before September 1, 2022, may still have access to the barcode scanner in their free account, which was the case with one of our test accounts.
In our estimation, the free version of MyFitnessPal is ideally suited to helping someone maintain their weight after a weight-loss program. It's also perfectly good for helping you lose weight through calorie counting alone—although many people find they need more support and guidance from a complete weight-loss program to lose weight in a healthy way.
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MyFitnessPal Premium eliminates advertisements and adds macronutrient and other nutritional information, and of course, you get the barcode scanner. You also need Premium if you want to use MyFitnessPal to set up an intermittent fasting schedule. Premium lets you further customize the app, too. 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. You can make the app display carbs, protein, and fat by meal. With a Premium account, you can export CSV files of your data. You also get exclusive content like short motivational videos and workout examples, though they aren't compelling.
How Much Do Other Weight Loss Apps and Programs Cost?
Compared with other apps for weight loss and calorie counting, the price for MyFitnessPal Premium is high, especially for the monthly subscription. LoseIt is very similar to MyFitnessPal, though it keeps more features behind its paywall—notably, you can't sync fitness trackers or other devices to calculate your calorie burn. And, as with MyFitnessPal, you have to be a paying member of LoseIt to use its barcode scanner. That said, LoseIt's annual price is $39.99, which is much lower than MyFitnessPal's.
Then there are apps that are part of larger weight-loss or weight-management programs, like Noom and WeightWatchers. Noom has a high list price—$70 per month—although the amount you pay could be significantly less. When we last tested the app, the 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 right now is $209. With Noom, you get food logging, as well as daily articles to read about the psychology of weight loss. After the first few weeks, you also get put into a group chat with other Noom users.
WeightWatchers costs about $23 per month when you pay monthly. WeightWatchers, sometimes called WW, is not only an app for logging food but also an active community with online groups you can join based on different topics, such as nurses, veterans, people older than 60, postpartum mothers, vegans, and others. With some program types, you get one-on-one coaching or in-person meetings, but those cost more. There are some hidden fees, such as 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.
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 goes quickly, though, which is not the case with dedicated 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." At 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 log everything you eat and drink each day. You can search for foods manually or use a barcode scanner (for Premium accounts only) to get the nutritional info for packaged foods you eat. In addition to food, you also log activities either manually or by connecting the app to supported fitness apps. The list of options is long and includes all the top players like Fitbit, Garmin, Google Fit, Polar, Strava, 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. 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, or ounces. MyFitnessPal makes it easy to find the right measurement estimations for you.
The best thing by far 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 we'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 you can decide whether the burrito you 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 deal 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 nutritional info for scones you made, you enter all the ingredients and the number of portions, and MyFitnessPal calculates the nutritional info for one serving. You can keep your recipe private or add it to the public database. You can also import recipes from websites by dropping a URL into a field on the recipe page. We haven't seen any other calorie-counting app offer that feature to date. We do recommend you check the imported measures are correct so you don’t end up with two pounds of eggs instead of two eggs in your recipe thanks to one of the app's occasional misfires.
The MyFitnessPal Experience
We've been testing MyFitnessPal since 2011 and use it for weeks at a time periodically. In our experience, just the act of using MyFitnessPal to become more aware of what we're eating and how much we're moving each day ends up in losing a few pounds. 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.
In one round of testing, one of us (Jill) used MyFitnessPal to log and watch her eating habits while she simultaneously followed a weight-loss program, Noom. She lost about four pounds. MyFitnessPal Premium is better than Noom in how it shows nutritional information. Noom doesn't calculate your macronutrient balance or the quantity of other nutrients you consume, but MyFitnessPal Premium does.
Within the app, you can join challenges and programs, but they aren't anything like the dieting programs you get with WeightWatchers or Noom. Those programs work to help you change your relationship with food and manage not only how many calories you eat but also what kinds of foods. 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.
MyFitnessPal Recipes, Blog Content, and Community
MyFitnessPal does have more to explore, though none of it is central to the calorie-counting experience, and the quality is merely so-so. 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, we saw little reason to return to them. For example, one piece of content talked about how raking leaves and yard work burns calories—it's not exactly ground-breaking information.
There's also a community of MyFitnessPal members who chat on forums. You can share and read success stories, swap recipes, and whatnot. In our opinion, the interaction here isn't as engaging as what you 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 you're assigned to a support group, which limits the people you meet. The WeightWatchers groups function on an opt-in basis, so you get to choose which ones you want to join. WW has the best variety of communities by far.
Dieting With MyFitnessPal
As mentioned, MyFitnessPal isn’t and doesn’t seek to be a diet app. It helps you keep track of what you’re eating, gives you a breakdown of how the foods you eat affect you, encourages you to work out, and so on. It even offers meal plans, but it doesn’t tell you what to eat and when to eat as other apps do. What it does, however, is provide support for those who want to take on intermittent fasting.
Intermittent fasting is one of the most popular diets in recent years because you eat pretty much the same things you always have, with the only rule being when you eat. In MyFitnessPal, you need a Premium account to use the intermittent fasting features. We do not necessarily endorse intermittent fasting and advise you to check with your doctors (including mental health doctors) first to make sure it's a healthy option for you.
You start by selecting your fasting schedule from three options:
12:12, where you fast for 12 hours and get a 12-hour eating window, which is the easiest.
14:10, or 14 hours of fasting followed by a 10-hour eating window.
16:8, or 16 hours of fasting followed by 8 hours of eating, which is the most challenging.
Then, you choose an ideal fasting start time, and the app calculates when your next eating window opens. Finally, the app provides some tips so you have a successful experience, such as eating meals with protein, fats, and fiber so you can feel fuller for longer and avoid sugar spikes.
As far as the app is concerned, all you really get are extra notifications and an interface to track just how well you’ve kept to the schedule. That said, it’s super useful to have all these features mixed together. Sure, plenty of intermittent fasting apps send you reminders, but do you want another one on your phone? It’s so much easier to have all the information in the same place where you log your food, water, and exercise.
Managing Your MyFitnessPal Plan
With MyFitnessPal, everything pertaining to the Premium account is self-service. You can get a free trial of the Premium account, and we recommend doing it through the Apple App Store or Google Play rather than the website if you want the easiest way to manage your subscription.
The 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 apps to use for counting calories and activity, and the Premium version gives you useful information about nutrition. We're less enthusiastic about this app than we used to be now that the Premium price is so high and the free version no longer includes the barcode scanner. If you don't need that scanner, it's still an excellent app to use for free calorie tracking. If you're looking for a more traditional weight loss program, however, you're better off with Noom or WeightWatchers because they have more in the way of guidance, coaching, and social support.
With a massive food database, cross-platform availability, and a long list of compatible apps and devices, MyFitnessPal is a great tool to use in conjunction with a weight loss or exercise program.
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