For the first 10 days of my plan I was keeping track of the foods I ate in a little notebook. While in theory that was a great way to see what foods I was consuming, this was not an accurate way to count my calories. Counting calories is the whole idea!
I remembered a while back I had downloaded this app called MyFitnessPal because it was one of the top apps. At the time I hadn't really explored it too much. I knew it was a place to enter food, but I had no idea how much it could actually do! I had an extra break today so I decided to explore. I was amazed at how many brand name foods they had! Other calorie counters I looked at have a generic food name and number. This app is so specific that it had my exact brand and flavor of yogurt. As I explored more I quickly realized how specific the foods were! Incredible!
The settings page allows you to enter goals for calories, weight, workout days, and much more. I was able to enter my 1700 calories a day goal. As you enter your food you pick whether it was for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snack. The program will deduct the calories you have and break it down by each meal. I am able to see exactly how many calories I have had and where!
The coolest thing about the app so the bar code scanner feature. Tonight I was able to scan the code on the lettuce, cheese, salsa, sour cream, and chips I used for my taco salad. When you scan the bar code it will bring up the calories based on the serving size on the package. From there you can adjust the serving size to fit what you had! This is an amazing tool because it takes time away from searching through a list of foods (not that searching the list takes forever).
Another fun feature of the app is that once you have entered a food, you will be able to select it again. I also have the app on my iPad so anything i enter on my phone is shared and sent to the iPad app. These are the features I am most familiar with at this point.
Today was a great day food wise! I am really getting the hang of this:) I am excited to start cooking next week! I spent a little time tonight going through and looking for some recipes!
Quote of the day: Everyday do something that will inch you closer to a better tomorrow!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
sounds like a great app! I've been using fitday.com since high school ( not consistently though) so I've actually programmed a lot of my favorite foods into that one.
ReplyDeleteGreat way to track your progress and keep yourself honest! Technology is pretty cool :-)
ReplyDeleteI've used Calorie Counter before - have to give it a whirl!
Glad it is going well and finding new cool things to keep it interesting!