There’s a time in our life when we come to a point where we want to make a change in our health, whether it’s to lose weight, address health concerns or just to have a flatter stomach. We can do this in many ways such as changing our exercise habits, our diets, or trying the latest and greatest fad. As the New Year is approaches, this search for the perfect nutrition and fitness craze will be a common topic in the next few weeks. A highly popular solution in recent years is using an app to help track your eating and exercise habits. It’s cheap, easy, and right in the palm of your hand. The most popular app to help with this tracking is MyFitnessPal. Let’s take a look what MyFitnessPal (MFP) can do for someone who has new health goals to lose weight.
-Goal Setting: MFP will start with asking you about your current health status. You can add your height, weight, age, goal weight, and how much weight you want to lose per week.
-Daily Guide: It will then give you a mapped out plan of how many calories to eat each day, and an estimation of how many carbohydrates, fats, and proteins to eat each day.
-Community: You can share with others how you are doing and have friends and family keep track of their habits as well.
Doesn’t that sound like a great plan? It definitely can be a very helpful guide. However, there are some cracks in this plan. First off let’s discuss the goal setting feature. It begins with asking how active you are during your normal daily activities and weekly exercise amounts. As we humans do with many things like how much money we make, we also tend to overestimate how active we are throughout the entire week. Plus, we know if we GIVE ourselves more activity we GIVE ourselves more calories to consume.
After we select our activity amount we can choose how fast we want to lose weight. Half a pound a week? 2 pounds a week? Of course we all want to lose weight as fast as we can. By selecting how fast we want to lose pounds MFP has a standard of how many calories it will cut off your daily consumption each day. And what is it we are actually losing? My Fitness Pal does not have a way to measure if the weight that is lost is muscle, fat, or water. It is important to make sure that calories are not cut too low, as our body will lose some muscle in the processes, in turn slowing our metabolism.
The community on MFP and other smartphone apps are a great way to keep people motivated but accuracy and accountability is key in reaching and sustaining a successful goal. With MFP there is a feature where anyone in the community can add food to the program. This is like Wikipedia for meal planning. The food listed may be correct or completely skewed. For example,a search for Texas Roadhouse Pulled Pork on My Fitness Pal rendered a list of choices. One was ½ cup at 300 calories, one said 1 sandwich is 565 calories, another was listed at 100g and 600 calories. I then went over to Texas Roadhouse’s website and found they have their pulled pork listed at 840 calories, NOT including the sides. How can anyone be sure what they are consuming taken off this community list is accurate all?
Another example of incorrect data is with the restaurant Cafe Zupas. They do not have their nutrition information listed for the public to see, yet MFP has most of their calorie information listed. These listed calories are based off a guess someone is making looking at what ingredients which are listed. This is nearly impossible without exact serving sizes of each ingredient listed and how they were cooked? Was it in oil and if so what kind? You get the picture.
One research study looked at over 200 people for 6 months using MFP. They measured their weight loss after that time and frequency of using the app. After 6 months they found that a smartphone app is not likely to help with substantial weight changes. They also found that after the first month there was a 44% drop in daily logins. By the 6th month 77% of the participants had stopped logging in (Laing BY, et al). There is no one checking on you and seeing if you are adhering to the program you set for yourself.
There are many individuals that are trying to improve their health status, but are not sure where to begin. Apps on our phone seem to be the quickest, cheapest, and most popular go-to these days. However, many of these apps are limited on the accuracy on suggested nutrients, calorie content on food, and calories expended during workouts. They also don’t have a way to offer education on nutrition or any real accountability. This limits people’s abilities to make sustainable changes in their life. By coming to Total Health and Fitness you have a certified nutrition/fitness consultant who meets with you one-on-one who customizes your menu and exercise program each week and teaches you about the food and exercise your body needs to reach your health and fitness goals, creating lifelong results and sustainable habits.
References:
- http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/search
- https://www.texasroadhouse.com/menu/interactive-menu
- http://www.myfitnesspal.com/nutrition-facts-calories/zupas/2
- Laing BY, Mangione CM, Tseng CH, et al. Effectiveness of a smartphone application for weight loss compared with usual care in overweight primary care patients: a randomized, controlled trial. Ann Intern Med. 2014;161(10 Suppl):S5-12.
