MyFitnessPal iPad App
At the beginning of this semester, Dr. Bell had all of the
physical education majors download the MyFitnessPal app which counts your daily
calories and it also will assist you is setting an appropriate daily calorie
intake depending on whether or not you want to lose or gain weight. She wanted
us to keep up with our daily diet for the whole semester to see how and what we
ate throughout the semester and if it helped reach our individual weight
levels.
Throughout the day, you can easily and quickly add food by
the brand that you have eaten and it will go directly in to your daily calorie
intake amount and will tell you how many calories still need to eat by the end
of the day.
As you enter in each food
item, it also calculates certain types of nutrients such as calcium, fats, and
iron and gives you a percentage of how much you have taken in and how much you
have left to get throughout the day. If you exercise during the day, you can
also enter that information in such as what type of exercise and the length of
time that you did it. This will affect your calorie intake and most likely
increase your daily amount needed because when you exercise you burn calories
so you need to make up for the calories you burned.
Friends can also hold you accountable for your diet if they
have the app as well. You can add contacts from your phone, facebook, or email
so that they can help you stay motivated and on the right track to maintain and
achieve your health and weight goals. As you weigh yourself periodically, you
can also input that information and monitor your progress to your weight goal.
This app is very useful for health teachers. If you want
students to keep a journal of everything that they ate for a week and also how
much they exercised, this would be an easy way to do it. Also, if they went out
to eat, instead of guessing the calories in the food they can just look it up
through this app and it can help the overall diet and assessment be more
accurate. I have used this app throughout the semester and I would highly
recommend it.
