How To Use MyFitnessPal Properly
Most people download MyFitnessPal, track for four days, get annoyed and delete it. Usually because nobody showed them how to set it up, how to weigh things, or which of the 47 entries for "chicken breast" is the right one.
Set up properly, tracking takes about four minutes a day and teaches you more about food in a fortnight than a decade of guessing. Here's exactly how I get my clients to use it.
01Set it up in five minutes
Download it, make a free account (you do not need Premium, and I'll come back to that), and go into your goals.
The setup that matters
- Goals → set your calorie target manually rather than accepting the app's guess. If you're coached by me, use the number I gave you
- Goals → set macros as grams, not percentages. Percentages shift every time your calories change, and that gets confusing fast
- Settings → turn OFF "add exercise calories back". This is the single biggest cause of stalled fat loss
- Diary settings → add a "snacks" meal so odd bits have somewhere to live instead of being skipped
- Turn off the app's step and exercise syncing from your watch for the same reason as above
That exercise-calories setting deserves more than a sentence, because it's the reason more diets stall than any other single thing.
Your calorie target already assumes you're an active person who trains. When the app then hands back 400 "earned" calories after a session, it's counting your training twice. Worse, the estimates are wildly generous: trackers routinely overstate calorie burn by 30 to 90 per cent. An hour of lifting is usually 200 to 300 calories, not the 600 your watch claims. Eat those phantom calories back and a careful 500-calorie deficit becomes no deficit at all, which is exactly why so many women swear they're "eating 1,400 a day" and not losing.
Setting your calorie target
If you're not coached, a workable starting point is bodyweight in kilos multiplied by 30 to 33 for maintenance, then subtract 300 to 500 for fat loss. A 65kg woman lands around 1,950 to 2,150 maintenance, so roughly 1,600 to 1,800 to lose fat steadily. That's a starting estimate, not a prophecy: track for two weeks, watch your weekly average weight, and adjust from the evidence rather than the calculator.
Setting your macros
Set protein first, because it's the number that decides whether you keep your muscle. Then fats for hormones. Carbs get whatever's left, and they fuel your training.
| Macro | Target | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Protein | 1.6 to 2.2g per kg bodyweight | Protects muscle in a deficit, keeps you full |
| Fat | 0.8 to 1g per kg bodyweight | Hormones, cycle health, absorbing vitamins |
| Carbs | Whatever calories remain | Training fuel and recovery |
For that 65kg woman on 1,700 calories: roughly 130g protein, 55g fat and 165g carbs. Set those as grams in the app and stop thinking about it.
02Weigh food, don't guess it
Get digital food scales. They cost about a tenner and they're the difference between tracking and pretending to track. Cups, handfuls and "a medium banana" are where the errors hide, and the errors are rarely in your favour.
Two rules that clear up most confusion:
Weighing rules
- Weigh raw where you can. 100g of raw chicken becomes about 70g cooked, and the entry you pick needs to match the state you weighed it in
- Rice and pasta: weigh dry. 75g dry rice is roughly 225g cooked, and the dry number is far more reliable
- Use the tare button. Bowl on the scales, press tare, add ingredient, log, tare again, add the next. No maths, no washing up
- Oil counts. A generous glug of olive oil is 150 to 200 calories. It's the most commonly forgotten thing in anyone's diary
- Sauces, dressings and lattes count too. Liquid calories are still calories
The raw versus cooked confusion, solved
This trips up almost everyone. Food loses water when it cooks, so the same food weighs less cooked but contains the same calories. 100g of raw chicken and the 70g it becomes are identical in energy. Rice and pasta go the other way: they absorb water and get heavier.
| Food | Weigh it | Rough conversion |
|---|---|---|
| Chicken, beef, fish | Raw where possible | 100g raw → ~70–75g cooked |
| Rice | Dry | 75g dry → ~225g cooked |
| Pasta | Dry | 75g dry → ~170g cooked |
| Oats | Dry | Always dry, they triple in the pan |
| Potatoes | Raw | Roughly the same either way |
| Bacon | Raw | Loses a lot of fat and water, big difference |
If you only ever have the cooked weight, search for an entry that says "cooked" explicitly. Just never mix the two up: logging cooked chicken against a raw entry underestimates you by around 30 per cent.
Cooking oil, butter in the pan, salad dressing, mayo, the milk in four coffees, the two bites of your child's dinner, the biscuit at work. In my experience this cluster is where most "I'm eating so little" diaries are wrong, and it routinely adds up to 300 to 500 calories a day. Log the oil. Log the latte. It changes everything.
03Picking the right entry from the barcode chaos
MyFitnessPal's database is user-generated, which means it's enormous and partly nonsense. Search "chicken breast" and you'll get entries claiming anything from 90 to 400 calories per 100g.
How to pick a good entry
- Scan the barcode first — supermarket own-brand entries are usually accurate
- Check the entry against the packet the first time you use it. Once you trust it, it's saved
- Prefer entries with a tick or a high number of confirmations
- For plain foods, look for round, sane numbers: chicken breast ~106 cal/100g raw, white rice ~355 cal/100g dry, olive oil 900 cal/100g
- Ignore entries where the protein and calories don't roughly add up
Do this properly for a fortnight and you'll never do it again, because you'll be logging from your recents list.
Sanity-check numbers worth memorising
If an entry is wildly different from these, it's wrong.
| Food (per 100g) | Calories | Protein |
|---|---|---|
| Chicken breast, raw | ~106 | ~24g |
| 5% beef mince, raw | ~140 | ~21g |
| Salmon fillet, raw | ~200 | ~20g |
| White rice, dry | ~355 | ~7g |
| Pasta, dry | ~350 | ~12g |
| Oats | ~370 | ~11g |
| Greek yoghurt, 0% | ~57 | ~10g |
| Olive oil | ~900 | 0g |
| Whey protein | ~380 | ~75g |
04The features that save you real time
This is where tracking goes from a chore to thirty seconds a day.
Learn these five
- Recipes. Build your chilli once with every ingredient weighed, tell it how many portions it makes, and log "one portion" forever after
- Meals. Save your usual breakfast as a saved meal and log the whole thing in one tap
- Copy previous day. Ate the same as yesterday? One tap copies the lot
- Copy to another meal. Great for repeat lunches
- Quick add. For when you genuinely can't identify something at a restaurant. Estimate honestly and move on
Pre-log your day the night before
This is the habit that separates people who find tracking easy from people who find it miserable. Instead of logging after the fact and discovering at 8pm that you've somehow got 90 calories left for dinner, build tomorrow in the app tonight.
It takes four minutes, and it flips tracking from a scorecard into a plan. You can see instantly that if you want a glass of wine on Friday, lunch needs to be lighter, and you make that trade deliberately rather than feeling guilty afterwards.
Reading your own data
Tracking is only useful if you look at what it tells you. Once a week, spend two minutes on this.
Your weekly review
- Look at the weekly average, not single days. One 2,600-calorie day inside a good week is irrelevant
- Check protein consistency. Hitting it four days out of seven is the most common quiet failure
- Compare weight trend to calories. Two weeks of no movement at a genuine deficit usually means the deficit isn't genuine
- Spot the pattern days. Most people have one or two days a week that undo the rest. Find yours, plan for it
- Weigh yourself the same way. Same time, fasted, same scales, and judge the weekly average, not daily noise
Your weight will bounce two kilos in a week from water, salt, your cycle and what's in your gut. That's normal and it means nothing. The trend across three or four weeks is the only line worth reading.
Tracking around your cycle
Worth knowing so you don't panic: most women hold noticeably more water in the week before their period, and appetite genuinely increases in the luteal phase. That's not a lack of willpower, it's physiology.
Two practical moves. First, compare like with like: this month's week three against last month's week three, rather than against last week. Second, if cravings are hard in that week, plan slightly higher carbs and a bit more volume in your food rather than trying to white-knuckle it. Adherence beats perfection every time.
05Eating out and being human about it
You cannot weigh a restaurant meal, so don't try. Find the closest chain entry, or log something similar and slightly generous. A dinner out logged approximately is infinitely better than a dinner out not logged at all, because the not-logging is what turns one meal into a lost week.
If you're eating out often, log the day before and after honestly and accept a sensible margin. Tracking is a tool for direction, not a lab experiment.
06The mistakes I see constantly
Don't do these
- Logging after the fact and guessing — log as you go, or pre-log your day in the morning
- Only logging on "good" days. The data is useless if it's flattering
- Eating back exercise calories (yes, again)
- Forgetting the bites while cooking, kids' leftovers and the biscuit at work
- Hitting calories but ignoring protein — protein is the number that changes your shape
- Panicking over one over-target day instead of looking at the weekly average
If the numbers say you should be losing but you're not
Nine times out of ten it's one of these, in this order.
Work through in order
- Untracked extras. Oil, sauces, drinks, tastes while cooking. Track a genuinely honest week before changing anything else
- Weekends. Five good days and two loose days averages out to maintenance. This is the most common answer by a distance
- Portion drift. Everyone's eyeballing gets more generous over a few weeks. Re-weigh for a week
- Exercise calories creeping back in. Check that setting is still off
- Not enough time. Two weeks is not enough to judge. Give it three to four
- Genuinely need less. If everything above is clean, drop by 150 calories, not 500
Do not respond to a stall by slashing calories to 1,200. You'll lose muscle, wreck your training, feel dreadful and rebound. Small adjustments, given time, win. If you find yourself wanting to cut harder and harder, that's the moment to talk to someone rather than going lower.
07Do you need Premium?
No. The free version does everything above. Premium mainly adds nicer breakdowns and macro targets per meal, which is a want rather than a need. Spend the money on food scales and good protein instead.
08How long should you track for?
Track properly for three to four weeks and something useful happens: you stop needing to. You'll know what 30g of protein looks like, what a portion of rice weighs, and which of your habits were quietly costing you 500 calories a day.
Most of my clients track intensively at the start of a phase, then move to tracking loosely, then check in with it whenever progress stalls. It's a set of scales for your eating, not a life sentence.
| Stage | How to track |
|---|---|
| Weeks 1–4 | Everything, weighed, every day. This is the learning phase |
| Weeks 5–12 | Everything, but leaning on saved meals and recipes. Two minutes a day |
| Maintaining | Track a few days a week, or just protein, or nothing at all |
| Stalled or starting a new phase | Back to weighing everything for a fortnight |
Tracking suits most people, but not everyone. If logging food makes you anxious, if you find yourself hiding numbers, skipping meals to "save" calories, or thinking about the app constantly, stop tracking and speak to your GP or a professional. There are other ways to eat well, and no physique goal is worth your relationship with food.
Ready when you are
Reading is a great start. It all gets easier when the plan's built for you and someone's in your corner. Train with me at UltraFlex Durham or Hii Club Gosforth, or get coached online anywhere.
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