ELYSE GRIECO
Life & Arts Editor
Let’s be honest: we’re all in the same boat as college students. It’s only a few weeks in and we’re already bombarded with school work.
It’s when I’m extremely exhausted and sidetracked that I find myself not putting the important things, like my health, first.
That’s why I love the app “My Fitness Pal.”
“My Fitness Pal” allows you to track your health in an easy way.
When you first log on, the app asks you whether your goal is to gain weight, lose weight or stay the same.
It also asks you your basic information like your gender, height and age to help determine what a healthy weight is for you.
It’s safe to say I’m the worst at eating healthy.
Sometimes I’ll be up until 3 a.m. finishing a project, so I’ll wake up late and not eat breakfast. Other times, I’ll miss lunch.
The worst is when I’m busy all day and forget to eat until night time.
At that point, I’m usually so exhausted and hungry that I’m ready to shove any food I possibly can down my throat, typically something bad for me.
Afterall, it is so much easier to go to McDonalds and get a burger and fries than it is to try to go home and cook a healthy meal.
Even most of the food on campus is somewhat fattening.
“My Fitness Pal” has a diary tab that lets you track exactly what you’ve eaten throughout the day.
The app has the ability to take the specific brands of food you’ve eaten and tell you how many calories they contain.
It is even able to give this information from restaurants, like Applebee’s and Burger King, too.
It takes the information that you provide when you first download the app and lets you know the amount of calories you should eat every day depending on what you are using the app for.
When I logged in, I told the app I wanted to lose weight.
It asked me how active I was, and I had to embarrassingly answer, “very low activity.”
Don’t judge me. I’m a journalism major. I type in front of a computer and drink coffee in my free time.
It told me that if I wanted to lose weight for my specific information, I would have to consume around 1,700 calories daily.
But, there is an exception.
The app not only lets you log your calories, but it also lets you log your exercise.
You can press either cardio or strength training and then can specifically record what exercises you do and for how long.
The app than can convert the information into the amount of calories you’ve burned and adds them back onto the calories you can eat that day.
For example, if I do an exercise for an hour and burn 444 calories, I can add that to my 1,700 and be able to eat a little more that day while still reaching my goal.
It also can track the amount of steps you take a day to let you know if you’re meeting the standard goal.
I’ve been using this app for a few years now whenever I feel like I’m a little out of shape.
It’s helped me lose and maintain a healthy body weight and make me feel better about how I feel and how I look.
Being able to download it on my phone and enabling notifications is a good and easy reminder to have in my busy life.
“My Fitness Pal” has an overall rating of 4.7 in the App Store and is available for free download.