My Fitness Pal is a free mobile calorie tracker app. It can track macro and micro nutrients, water intake, and exercise to help you reach weight goals, or if you need to watch your intake of a specific nutrient (I’m looking at you, sodium). To enter meals, there’s a food lookup and you can scan the barcode when available. For exercise, there’s also a search where you can input intensity and duration to calculate calories burned. This app also pairs with My Running Pal, which you can use to track activities with more detail and send info back to My Fitness Pal.

Personally, I find it very useful with portion control. I struggle a lot with that in general, and I know I’m not alone, especially around holidays. It’s been just over a year since I began using this application, and it’s helped me change how I portion and relate to food. Not only did it help me get halfway to my goal weight, but the app also helped me eat Phone and Foodthe calories I needed while training for my half marathon last November without binging.

There’s a ton of functionality in this app. and I can’t really do it justice in a couple paragraphs, so I hope you download and check it out. I’d like to hear from you too! Do you already use a calorie counter? What are your favorite features? If you already use My Fitness Pal, what do you like and/or not like about it? What do you use it for?

– Caitlynn