my fitness pal – Briana Hansen

besties I’m trying it again. If you recall, I think My Fitness Pal is a jerk. But, as I mentioned earlier in this week, I’m on a Data Diet. And because I can’t fork up the big bucks for a personal trainer or a personalized diet and fitness coach yet, I’m gonna give this asshole app another try. But this time, I’ve enlisted help from a friend.

My friend let me stay with him for Comic Con and we were lucky enough to get to hang out almost all weekend. And he got to meet Data, too. And he was as inspired to get into shape as I am. So we talked about it and decided we’d get each other’s backs and do this dumb Fitness Pal thing again.

So I made him my friend on there (the only one I have because I don’t like sharing all my information with everyone- contrary to the impression this website may give…). I can see how he’s doing and he can see how I’m doing. And because I don’t see him every day and only chat with him periodically, it could be perfect. I’m gonna assume he’s working hard at his diet and exercise and he’ll assume the same for me. And we can check in with each other’s progress on the app. And provide moral support when needed. And not let each other get away with excuses.

At least that’s the hope. We’ll see how it goes…

There’s a popular app I use called “My Fitness Pal.” You input your current weight, your goal weight, your approximate energy level for your job and it calculates the amount of calories you should eat in order to get to that goal weight.

You can also input your exercises so it can account for that in your calorie goals. Then, throughout your day, you input the foods you’re eating to keep track of it. You can even scan barcodes and it uses a massive system of other people who use the app to help you with your nutritional needs.

It’s a great app.

But it’s a jerk.

I’m not great at keeping up with it. It tells me a very low number of calories I’m allowed any given day. Lately, I’ve been focusing on lifting more. So the actual calories burned during my exercise aren’t easy to calculate. But when I do enter my lifting into the app, it doesn’t calculate them at all. Sure, it could just more effective maybe to still go with the smaller number and just pretend like I didn’t exercise. But when I really go hard at the gym, I know my body is craving more calories for muscle building than My Fitness Pal wants me to intake. So I have to guesstimate the difference.

And guess what happens? I always over-estimate. I assume I can eat more than it wants me to eat. So then I just give up tracking the calories because I assume the number is all off anyway. Then I get frustrated if I’m not losing weight, know I should probably use something like My Fitness Buddy to help me keep tabs on my calorie intake. So the whole cycle starts up again.

I dunno what to do about it. So I blame that jerk, My Fitness Pal. It’s definitely the app’s fault.

I think I need a real fitness pal, rather than an app. But that would require talking to a real-life human, and we all know that’s too scary.

So I’ll stick with my computers and my virtual reality. In my SIMS world, I weight 118 lbs of pure, healthy muscle. Hooray for computer programming!

Tag: my fitness pal

My REAL Fitness Pal

My Fitness Pal is a jerk