How much chicken did you eat? How much coconut milk or cream did you eat? How big was the vegetable portion? Estimate all the individual ingredients and enter them individually. Not tracking a meal won’t put you further from your goal, it might remind you that food isn’t just numbers, you might enjoy the meal more, you might eat it slower, savour the taste and stop when satisfied. Sure, your daily total won’t be on target but in reality, if you guessed and manipulated the numbers to be close to the target, then you’re not actually tracking your food intake - you’re just playing a numbers game. That’s totally fine and probably better than entering something random. If you don’t really know, don’t track it. What do you do instead? Here are some options: You’ve just made a guess and the chances are, it’s not even close to the calories you actually ate. Just because you find an entry that sounds similar to your meal, doesn’t mean that it reflects what you actually ate in any way. You’ve just made the 3rd biggest mistake.Īnyone can add entries to MyFitnessPal. It was yellow curry with chicken, so in the app you type “yellow curry with chicken” and select one of the hundreds of entries available. You pick up your phone to enter the meal. You make a meal at home, or buy one out, or have one cooked for you. Here are the top 3 biggest My Fitness Pal mistakes: 3 - Selecting Random Meal Entries It’s not magic and we need to be aware of some common mistakes when using the app. Here’s the catch - the app is just data, just information. There are many mistakes which can be made which can be frustrating when your progress doesn’t match what the app is telling you.

However, downloading the MyFitnessPal app and plugging in some estimations of your meals isn’t always going to lead to progress. So it makes sense that getting a good idea of how many calories we are eating and drinking each day can help us move towards goals that relate to our body shape and size. Our body weight is predominantly dictated by the balance between the energy we consume and the energy we burn (1).

It is a method of portion control, to understand how many calories are in the foods you eat. MyFitnessPal is an app popular with those tracking their food intake.

Fitness pal calorie tracker