MyFitnessPal is an app popular with those tracking their food intake. It is a method of portion control, to understand how many calories are in the foods you eat.
Our body weight is predominantly dictated by the balance between the energy we consume and the energy we burn (1). So it makes sense that getting a good idea of how many calories we are eating and drinking each day can help us move towards goals that relate to our body shape and size.
However, downloading the MyFitnessPal app and plugging in some estimations of your meals isn’t always going to lead to progress. There are many mistakes which can be made which can be frustrating when your progress doesn’t match what the app is telling you.
Here’s the catch - the app is just data, just information. It’s not magic and we need to be aware of some common mistakes when using the app.
Here are the top 3 biggest My Fitness Pal mistakes:
3 - Selecting Random Meal Entries
You make a meal at home, or buy one out, or have one cooked for you. You pick up your phone to enter the meal. It was yellow curry with chicken, so in the app you type “yellow curry with chicken” and select one of the hundreds of entries available.
You’ve just made the 3rd biggest mistake.
Anyone can add entries to MyFitnessPal. Just because you find an entry that sounds similar to your meal, doesn’t mean that it reflects what you actually ate in any way. You’ve just made a guess and the chances are, it’s not even close to the calories you actually ate.
What do you do instead? Here are some options:
If you don’t really know, don’t track it.
That’s totally fine and probably better than entering something random. Sure, your daily total won’t be on target but in reality, if you guessed and manipulated the numbers to be close to the target, then you’re not actually tracking your food intake - you’re just playing a numbers game. Not tracking a meal won’t put you further from your goal, it might remind you that food isn’t just numbers, you might enjoy the meal more, you might eat it slower, savour the taste and stop when satisfied.
Estimate the individual portions.
How much chicken did you eat? How much coconut milk or cream did you eat? How big was the vegetable portion? Estimate all the individual ingredients and enter them individually. This might help put you somewhere in the ballpark depending on how well you can estimate. Hot tip, us humans aren’t great at estimating (2). Especially for purchased meals, it’s best to overestimate calories as meals we buy are typically significantly higher calorie than our home cooked meals (3).
Find a menu online with calorie and macronutrient values.
Maybe you can find a Thai restaurant which has worked out the calories of their meals and you could use their estimations. This can be easier for franchise restaurants which do post nutritional information online (fast food restaurants, pizza places, sushi hub) however again, it’s an estimation and might not really reflect what you actually ate.
Our suggestion: weigh and measure the meals that are practical to do so and get really good at tracking your home-cooked meals. Over time build an awareness of how much 100 grams of meat is, how much sauce you generally use, compare portions of ingredients to your hands to give you a constant estimation tool. Don’t worry too much about tracking meals that you don’t have control over. If anything, estimate the individual ingredients but also look at those times as an opportunity to work on your nutrition skills relating to eating slowly, being aware of hunger and satisfaction, enjoying the flavours and stopping when satisfied - even if you haven’t finished your meal.
2 - Entering exercise or linking activity trackers to the app
We know you want to link everything into the app and make MyFitnessPal your one stop shop. Don’t do it, we repeat, don’t link or enter your exercise in the app. If you want to track your exercise, do it in another app or make notes in your phone.
Estimating calories burned through exercise is unreliable, even if you have an expensive watch. The estimations in the app for exercise are just that - estimations of calories burned which most likely, won’t accurately reflect how many calories you burned (4).
When setting up your account, set your calorie targets with activity included. The best way to get an idea of this is to have a coach, or use the estimations here at the NIH Bodyweight Planner.
If you enter your exercise in the app, MyFitnessPal will alter your daily calorie targets. If these are overestimated, which is likely, then you may end up eating more calories than you burn and increase your size.
If you are an athlete, training 6+ hours per week (note, 6 hours of training, not 6 hours in the gym with most of that on instagram) then you should be accounting for your training calories burned and setting your targets will need more care and attention.
If you are not an athlete, then your exercise calories will not be the biggest chunk of your calories burned for the day. It will be a small part of your week and your focus should be on keeping your calorie targets and intake fairly consistent day to day and making adjustments in time based on your progress, both in terms of your body shape and size as well as how you feel.
1 - Focusing on numbers and targets rather than your lifestyle
The number 1 biggest mistake with My Fitness Pal is forgetting that your approach to nutrition is part of your lifestyle. Tracking calories and macros should be a reflection of your lifestyle, with improving nutrition habits over time.
Before you go seeing how many Snickers bars you can eat in a day and stay under your calorie target, look at your meals and habits.
Are you consistent with the amount of meals you eat per day and does that number suit you, your preferences and your lifestyle?
Do you have 20-40 grams of protein with each meal?
Do you have plants with each meal, at least 300 grams of fruit across that day and 400 grams of vegetables?
Are you hitting a minimum amount of fats per day for health (20% of your total calories) and are most of your fats coming from plant sources (nuts/seeds, avocado, olives and olive oils) and marine sources (oily fish like salmon/sardines)?
Are you hitting a fibre target or 25-30 grams per day? (or 15 grams per 1000 calories of your daily target)
Are most of your carbs coming from whole grains, fruit and vegetables?
Are you allowing yourself regular and realistic indulgences which are a small amount of your total calories, roughly <150 calories per day?
When looking at the app on your phone, look at the weekly view. Are your days fairly consistent or do the columns have huge variations? Aiming for consistent days is a huge part of tracking, especially at the beginning.
Check MyFitnessPal on your computer too as this can help you see your day laid out with protein per meal, fibre per meal and it can help you recognise why some meals might really satisfy you whilst others don’t.
Use MyFitnessPal on your computer to plan out a day. Before you focus too much on portion size, enter a whole day that you plan to eat. Make sure that the food choices reflect the lifestyle you want to lead as well as suiting your preferences. Once you have done that, then look at the total calories and macros and manipulate your portion sizes so that your chosen meals fit your calorie goal.
That’s how you get tracking to reflect your lifestyle, use the numbers as a way to guide your portion size - not as a way to dictate what foods you eat or don’t eat.
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