Miss Ginger Grant's Consumer Product Review®: MyFitnessPal® Calorie Tracking App

Miss Ginger promised you some Consumer Product Reviews on things she has used in her latest quest to a healthier life, so here's the first!  The MyFitnessPal app is a free download to any smartphone or computer, and is a great place to keep your fitness game on track!  It has some great features that make it easy to use, and it's web-based, so you can enter information into your smartphone, tablet, or computer, and it all syncs seamlessly! 

After you enter a little personal information about your physical dimensions, the app will give you a calorie goal appropriate for your gender and age.  Throughout the day, you enter the foods you consume, and the exercise you accomplish, and the app let's you know where you stand.  It's really quite easy! 

Entering foods is easier than it sounds because the app does so much of the work for you!  Once you've clicked the "add food" button, the meal chart pops up, and you click "add food" again under the appropriate meal.  Type the name of the food in the box and the app will search through thousands of foods to find a match, including brand-named products and restaurant foods!  

From your smartphone it's even easier to add grocery store products, because you can simply scan the barcode on the product with the camera and it will automatically add that food for you! Foods are always being added to the app, and in the odd case that you come across a food that isn't there, you can enter the item from the product labelling to add it to the app.  

You can also add your own recipes, so the things you cook often are always there in the app.  This works great for "make and freeze" meals, so you can fill your freezer with healthy, home-cooked meals and enter them as you eat them, as easily as you can enter packaged foods.  The app also remembers what you've eaten in the past, and give you those in a drop-down for fast entry. 

The app will also track your activity, and you add exercise in much the same way you add food.  You can select from a list of hundreds of different activities, then tell the app how long you did them, and it will give you those calories back, in effect allowing you to eat more when you are more active!  It even syncs with some of the most popular fitness apps and devices, entering those activities automatically as it is tracked!  

This was the "second" step in Miss G's journey, a fast, easy way to hold herself accountable and keep track of what went down her gullet! Several friends use the app as well, and by linking up with your friends, you can keep each other accountable as well! 

Check it out, download for free (the app shows you some relatively unobtrusive ads to cover its cost,) and add Miss Ginger if you decide to join up! MyFitnessPal definitely gets Miss Ginger's highest rating: 

FIVE LIPSTICKS!!!!