Original Blog 3: My Fitness Pal App

In the past few years we have all noticed the fitness and health craze including fads like yoga, sushi, and greek yogurt just to mention a few. But have we ever stopped to think how is it that this trend has even made it into our smartphones? Well that is what we will discover in today's blog. The app called My Fitness Pal has made its way into both the iPhone and the Android market. This relatively new app makes easy to keep track of ones calorie intake throughout the day as well as provide health advice and tips to maintain or loose weight. It even has a blog where you can read health related article and even find recipes.

So Exactly What Is It? And How It Can Help

The reviews state that there are both pros and cons to the app, as there is with everything. All in all however the app seems to be quite useful, having used it on my holiday vacation to track what I ate and how much exercise I needed to do to maintain my weight. What was great about the app was that not only does it scan in bar codes to make the process easier but it also contained a search box in which you could look up home made meals such as "arroz con guandules" (a typical Puerto rican dish) and add it to your daily food diary. Therefore almost making your calorie intake exact. This energizes a web phenomenon known as the groundswell because its taking a step further than just listening to its audience its catering to them before they ask. Lets face it there is a grand majority of us that eat traditional home cooked meals on a daily basis and cannot scan every item we use because they are not fully consumed by us and are just ingredients to a dish. Its the dish we are worried about figuring out. 

Counting Calories

When it comes to logging exercise, My Fitness Pal is great. There are loads of different exercises to choose from, from running, to skipping. All you have to do is log the amount of time you spent doing the activity or, if you used gym equipment, you can log the amount of calories the gym equipment told you that you’d burnt.

Tracking Exercise

The best this about the app is that it can be accessed from your computer, tablet or phone. 

Who is marketing it and pushing for its use? 

Interestingly enough you will find a lot of talk of this app mostly in fitness magazines. Fitness Magazine has several online articles talking about the new app as well as promoting its use. Now this is a cleaver move on their behalf because a large amount of their customer base are people who are trying to lose weight. If you simply google Fitness Magazine the first words after the magazine title are "weight loss-plans". People who read the magazine, download the app, and loose weight will accredit their weight loss ultimately to the magazine because it was their source of information leading to heir discovery of the app. And chances are people who use the app are likely to loose weight because research shows that those who keep a food journal six days a week lost about twice as much weight as those who kept food records one day a week or less. These positive results will keep customers subscribing for more magazines in order to learn new technologies or tricks that can continue to maximize or even maintain their results. Fitness magazine is promoting the app so much that they even posted an interview with the app creator on youtube. 

If you are trying to lose or maintain weight this great app may very well help. It is important to stay healthy and take pride in your body, after all you only get one.