Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Introducing Your New Fitness Friend: MyFitnessPal



Do you know what starts on March 1?  National Nutrition Month®!  This is an annual event sponsored by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.  The goal of this campaign is to make us more aware of the importance of knowing what we eat, making informed food choices and developing lifelong nutrition and physical activity habits that will support our efforts to be fit for life.

So, let me ask you a question.  How aware are you of what you eat every day?  Do you know how many calories per day you eat?  How many grams of protein, fat, carbohydrate or sodium?  Ok, many of you don't give a hoot about the numbers.  Bottom line is do you have a healthy nutrition plan? If not, why not?

In my opinion, you can't make meaningful assessments without the right tools. Over the years I have tried as many Fitness and Nutrition apps (Windows based and iOS) as time and money would allow, hoping to find that one app that would transform my ability to track my own health and one that my clients can use.  I found this in MyFitnessPal.

Many of you may already be familiar with MyFitnessPal.  It is a free app that runs on Window, iOS and Android platforms. It is highly mobile and incredibly user friendly.  No, I'm not sponsored by MyFitnessPal :-)  I just recognize the value of a good tool and want to encourage you to learn more about your own fitness and nutrition by using the tracking tool in MFP.  The other wonderful feature about MyFitnessPal is that once you have created your profile you can invite friends to follow you or submit requests to "friend" other MyFitnessPal users.  This will allow you to use this platform to leave encouraging messages for those you friend or to follow their diary (or have them follow yours).  You may soon feel that you have a crowd of virtual cheerleaders helping keep you motivated to get fit, eat well and develop habits that you will sustain for the long term.  MFP also integrates with a variety of activity tracking devices, has an integrated bar code scanning tool that smartphone users can leverage and lots of other "perks"!  It's 100% mobile so there is no excuse not to maintain your log, even when you're on the road.  I've created a 20 slide presentation on MFP Basics that I'm happy to share if you send me your email address.   

What's my ask with this post?  If you have never kept a nutrition and fitness journal find a new fitness friend and give MyFitnessPal a try. If you're already using MyFitnessPal or another app, let us know your thoughts in the comments below.  


References
MyFitnessPal: www.myfitnesspal.com
Reviews of Popular Nutrition Apps: http://www.eatright.org/Media/content.aspx?id=6442467041#.US6_ejCcfTQ
National Nutrition Month: http://www.eatright.org/NNM/#

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