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One month of MyFitnessPal a review

I do not usually post about things that I consider too personal, but I’ve achieved something personal that I found I just had to share. I’m not the healthiest person in the world, and I know I eat too much because at heart I’m a “fat kid” and love food. My daughter came to visit this summer and we started hitting the gym together almost every day. After about three weeks of doing this I noticed that my belt that fit perfectly before was now too loose. It still worked as a belt but barely.

On June 23rd I broke down and decided to try an app that my wife had been using for a while and started getting other people to use it also called My Fitness Pal. You can download it for Android, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, or Windows Phone 7. You can also access the site online in any web browser at www.myfitnesspal.com. Since that day I have nearly religiously [My wife says I obsess about it.] entered everything that I have eaten. I do some “guesstimation”, but generally try to err on the higher side. I also enter most of my actual exercise and try to err on the lower side.

I‘m quite happy to say that since that day just over a month ago, I have lost 20 pounds! Just writing that sounds incredible to me. I try my best to get to the gym twice a week, and if I do not I make sure that I do activity things [such as making large props for the LARP I play in (carpentry), practice combat (like fencing), and/or go for a walk]. My roommates got a huge kick out of watching me walk in circles around my parking lot at home for 15 minutes one night.

But losing that much by dieting can’t be healthy can it? Well I’m not a nutritionist, or particularly well versed in this sort of thing… but I feel better then I have in a while. I’ve started taking multivitamins. The app lets you see what your getting for a number of different categories [Fat, Cholesterol, Sodium, Potassium, Carbs, Protein, Vitamin A and C, Calcium and Iron]. I also track my water intake. It also has a great little scan bar code feature that lets you quickly and easily add items to your “food diary”.

If you concerned with your weight, or convinced your metabolism has betrayed you, by all means check this great (and FREE as in beer) app [or site] out. I’ve been amazed at how well it’s worked for me.

As a closing thought, some good friends of mine that I turned on this free product also picked up a great little pedometer device called a “Fitbit Ultra Tracker” that tells them how far they have walked, how many flights of stairs they have gone up, etc. The reason that I mention this is because you can add your FitBit to your MyFitnessPal account and it will automatically import the data measured by your tracker. While I have yet to pick one up myself, they think its “great” and they have almost swayed my opinion on spending $100 on the device.