My Fitness Pal or Foe
I’ve never really put two and two together in that I never considered I use apps to “track” myself. I always just said that I monitor certain aspects of my life, never truly acknowledging that I was quanitifying myself.
I use the app “My Fitness Pal” to track my daily caloric intake to help me lose weight and stay healthy. When registering for the app, you have to enter your name, birthday, weight, height, and, of course, contact information so they can send me a million emails. My Fitness Pal also has the user choose their average activity level (for metabolic purposes) and whether they want to lose, maintain, or gain weight. Based on all these things, it calculates a goal for calories that one should consume daily. After each meal, I open the app and start adding foods. The easy part is when you can just scan the barcode of a granola bar but it is more tedious when I have to enter every ingredient of my smoothie.
I can also enter exercise to counteract the food I’m eating. This isn’t mandatory but it is recommended to ensure that I am not consuming too few calories. However, the app collects data on how many steps I’m taking without any input on me. It has a location service that allows it to calculate how far I’ve been walking and it differentiates (I’m assuming by speed) whether I’m walking, on the bus, or driving.
The app is widely used and has helped change the way people are dieting and getting healthier. The future of this app is uncertain but they are currently in the works of producing new feature; they are developing a scanner so that, instead of having to input your food manually, you scan the food and it automatically enters it. With this feature, it would save time and perhaps, with time and fixes, be more accurate than when an individual has to guess how much cheese they put on top of something.
My Fitness Pal asks me frequently if I would like to post to social media, though I always say no. I don’t have it linked to any accounts for that reason, out of fear that it will post for me, without my permission. It has developed it’s own sort of social media platform in that you can connect with your friends who are also on the app and it has its own newsfeed of updates that are posted automatically when you record a meal or a workout.
I have mixed feelings about self tracking. My Fitness Pal has helped me lose weight because I was more aware of the decisions I was making but at the same time, I didn’t like having to constantly track everything about my day. Tracking my workouts makes me happier than tracking food though, because that at least seems like progress towards my health goal, whereas food seems like I’m taking steps backwards. I think other people who post to social media about this app are bragging, intending to show others how good they are or how fit, which is a little annoying. It’s also discouraging because, based on those original, aforementioned questions, my boyfriend gets over twice as many calories a day so I have to watch him post about Bojangles while I crunch on celery.
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I’m really curious how that scanning update might work, am I misunderstanding what you’re saying and is it just like an upgraded barcode scanner, or is it somehow able to scan food for the amount of each ingredient? Assuming the latter, that could really change not just how we track what we eat, but a lot of other stuff in the technologically led sectors. Though I would imagine it would take a lot of time and work for that tech to actually be functional.
Thanks for the insight on MyFitnessPal. I’d heard of the app many times since it is one of the more common tracking apps, but I never heard a first-hand account until now. I found your thoughts at the end particularly interesting. Although tracking apps are generally designed to compare someone at one state in time to that same person at an earlier time, there seems to be a bit of human nature that drives to compare ourselves to one another. It’s hard to get those bojangles-eating friends out of sight even though the self tracking is generally designed to compare within oneself.
I have always heard about the MyFitnessPal app, but I did not know that it did so much. Thanks for the insight! My views on others posting to social media are a little different. Even though there is a great chance that other are trying to brag, try to think of them a competition. I know that the competitiveness on my fitbit app always give me that extra push and motivation to keep going!
I have learned to love (and hate) the myfitnesspal app myself, but it’s always interesting to get other accounts on how they use and perceive the same technology. What I find interesting is the weight of foods. I have tried several different trackers and they are never spot on. A lot of them including myfitnesspal will ask if it was medium potato, large potato or small potato, and so on and so forth. This is better than nothing but for some a large potato may be 8oz while for other it may be 16oz. The difference between these personal discrepancies can be large. Sometimes the difference between 100 and 200 calories which can drastically alter your daily total over time. The only real way in my opinion is to weight things with a scale. Technology always finds a way to remedy problems though and hopefully this scanning feature will do just that! great post!
I think this blog fits in really well with the first two articles we asked you to read! I definitely think that our generation’s productivity is helped by quantifying themselves, especially when it comes to health and fitness. I also know what you mean about the being discouraged when other people do better/have more options than you do! Great response! Good luck with your goals!