Finding New Solutions - Runtastic and MyFitnessPal

I've known for quite a while that I needed to switch Fitness and Health Apps, but I wasn't quite ready to make the switch away from the site I had been using. Wow. Now that I've changed, I can't believe I waited so long!

For my workouts, I'm using Runtastic. It's simple, easy to use, and I can add live workouts (running, biking) and add gym workouts (treadmill, exercise bike, strength training, etc). I really appreciate that it syncs with my other fitness app, MyFitnessPal (MFP).

And now, let's talk about that second app. MFP is slick. The integration between exercising and eating is fantastic. I love being able to see the impact that a good workout has on my available calories for each day.

First, I set up my profile. I put in my starting weight and the number of pounds I would like to lose each week. And then I start tracking.

Start of each day

Looking at the image on the right, you can see that at the start of each day, my numbers look like this: 1500 calories available to eat, 0 calories eaten, 0 calories earned from fitness activities. I do eat before I go to the gym, but I don't always track my food as I'm eating. Usually, I like to get caught up later in the morning. The first thing I log, then, is my fitness activity. And here's how that looks on the app.

After logging my run

You can see here on the left that I ran for 30 minutes, burning 521 calories. Those exercise calories get added to my daily "can eat" totals, so now I can have just over 2,000 calories for the day and still be on track to lose my forecasted weight for the week.

I love this. When I'm working out, I'm already imagining how my fitness time will bump up my available calories for the day. The harder I work, the more I can eat.

By the time I add my food and my fitness, I have a great look at the impact of my entire day. Here, you can see that I took in 1,701 calories for the day. Had I not worked out, I would have been over my calorie goal. But because I had the extra fitness calories available, I ate what I wanted for the day and still came in over 200 calories under my goal.

It really helps, because I'm also less likely to cheat with crappy food and useless calories when I am reminded in black and white just how much work I had to do to earn them.

Who's happy with his changes? This guy.