Health & Fitness products & services make up what is becoming a trillion dollar industry. Part of the reason for that is because people in our country are experiencing a real issue with weight control, body image, and obesity related diseases.

Weight loss has even become a popular subject for television shows, talk shows, and news stories. In America, most of us (unless living in extreme conditions of poverty or debilitating illness) have all the information and every resource we could possibly ever need to lose weight. My Fitness Pal is another one of these resources, it’s a free online calorie counter that gives you the calories contained in all different types of foods, the calories you need for your body type, and the calories you burn during various exercise routines. So…will this neat tool actually help you reach your goals? Let’s do a quick review of what you’ll get.

Learn the Caloric Value of Lots of different foods.
It is very helpful to know the various calories contained in different foods and this is a great free tool to improve your knowledge in this area. As your knowledge grows, you’ll understand that counting calories is not for everyone and it might not be for you, using this website makes it easy. They give you a daily calendar that allows you to enter the types of food you’ve eaten for each meal. It keeps a running tally of your calories for the day.

Daily Activity Log and Calories Burned.
In addition to learning the caloric values of various foods, you’ll be able to enter your daily activities and meals into the same database. This is helpful because it allows you to understand calories in vs. calories out (the only way to actually lose weight).

Goal Setting Calculations
This part of the site was a little disappointing in my opinion. When you first sign up, you are asked your height, goal weight, and etc. I signed up and put my goal weight as 105 lbs. just to see what would happen. At 5’7”, 105lbs is an extreme goal. Well, the software just gave me how many calories I should eat today and sent me on my way, saying I would lose 5 lbs by August 5th.

Is This The Answer?
Not exactly, but I can say I feel this site is valuable in many ways. You can use it as an educational tool to learn more about calories, nutrition, and activity levels. But be aware that this type of program can get tedious. Logging in and entering all that information takes dedication and time (nothing wrong with that) but can get really old after a while.

This website is fully automated, but it does have a forum for support. In the forum you can interact with other dieters on your path to success. I think the forum is a good idea; it’s so much easier to reach your goals when you are working together with another person on the same path.

How Does this Help Me Reach My Goals?
This website will help you to understand the calories in/calories out part of weight loss, which is an important part. The entire Weight Watchers program is based on that alone. You will not however be using the best calculations for BMR (basal metabolic rate), ideal weight, or body fat %. In fact, nothing in what I saw mentions body fat %, which is indicated as a factor in many degenerative diseases (and it also makes a difference in what you look like at a certain weight).

This is a basic tool and everyone could learn something by using it. To actually lose weight, you’ll need dedication and commitment to actually using the software on a regular basis.

This review was sponsored by MyFitnessPal.com