me likey: My Fitness Pal

If you have been having difficulty tracking calories (as I did), you may want to check out this nifty (neat? swell?) little app.  It's called My Fitness Pal and it's been making my life considerably less difficult this week.  Even better: when you sign in and make a profile, it will let you know what your calorie target for the day is.  

I've been using it for the week and I ended up losing 3 lbs.  Not too shabby! It bases calorie values on a searchable database that you can peruse through and pick from.  Not sure how many calories that mocha was? Oh, it will tell you.  And then you cringe a little and go "Okay...better go for a walk (to China)."

The layout is pretty user-friendly, so even if you suffer from "sausage-fingers" like me, you can make your way through the day with less "I didn't f***ing press that, PHONE." You simply click on the meal/snacks that you want to add to, and you have the option to search a database, choose from foods you've made or you choose most often, or quickly add calories if you don't want to go through the lengthy process of adding an entire entry for whatever it is.  Found a fun little feature - if you start "creating" your foods and adding all of the nutritional values, you can actually check your stats and see how you're doing for grams of fat, carbs, fibre and all that other stuff.  

The Skinny

Pros: User-friendly interface, won't judge you if you go over your calorie limit, can take it anywhere with mobile version for iOS, Android and Blackberry (I know, no one uses Blackberry anymore, but goshdarnit they made it anyway!), can also add exercise to increase your daily calorie limit.

Cons: They might actually have this feature, haven't really looked too hard, but it would be nice if you could add the times of day that you're eating at.  It can be helpful to start looking for patterns ("Hmmm, why do I always eat 9 donuts at 4pm?").  I'm also aware it would add an extra step for calorie tracking and make it slightly more annoying, but maybe if it was an optional feature?

All in all: Get it!