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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

MyFitnessPal was horribly written app when I used it. The idea was good but God was it slow as hell when doing simple things.

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I begrudgingly use it when I'm focused on losing weight. As soon as I reach my goal, I'm out. It's too frustrating to use it multiple times a day, everyday. I should use it for bulking too, but I'd rather live with the inefficiency of not tracking things perfectly.

This leak disappoints me because my oat obsession should be known only by those who truly know me, like my family and the NSA.

If you use it despite bad UX due to speed, it must mean that they have great PMfit though?

When I first tried it in I think 2011/2012 it was garbage on android. Absolutely unusable. I used "Lose It!" for nearly 5 years because it performed much better, until it started getting extraordinarily slow when doing food searches. So I tried out MFP again and lo and behold, the app had improved tremendously!

I still am annoyed it doesn't open on diary by default. The picture+weight feature is nice though. Wish it let me track bodyfat too. As told I've got about 4 apps I use for fitness now:

MFP for food/calorie, weight, and picture tracking

Google Fitness for cardio maps and timing, and total gym time tracking. Also fun that it automatically records my bike rides. Not fun that I have to manually change my motorcycle rides from bike rides into not bike rides (when was the last time somebody got a bicycle up to 90mph on 280? shrug). Also track weight in there because I'm convinced one day google will implement some badass machine learning and I want the data there for when it happens.

"FitNotes" for setting lift routines and tracking weight in lifts. Also used for tracking bodyweight and bodyfat (only app in my list that tracks bodyfat). I add my bodyweight in there because it's cool to compare graphs of bodyweight to lifted weights. I've had great email conversations with the developer, he has a fantastic, simple development philosophy, and he has kept his app free for years now, with no ads or other BS.

Newly added "goodtime" for just a simple timer that will vibrate after 2 minutes, my break time between lifts. It was remarkably hard to find an app that just did this, as my default android alarm timer was tied to my alarm tone, so i'd have to switch it to vibrate and back when working out. Missed a morning alarm once before I decided enough of that...

It mostly works pretty well and looks okay, though the add actions have inexplicable lag on an iPhone X. The web page is horrendous, though.

Overall, the execution is good. I love the integration with iOS activity which means all my Strava and watch+activity and Wahoo cycling computer activities are tracked/integrated. I thought it would be a massive PITA and avoided tracking for years and years because of this, but I'm at something like 120 days straight and it's been a breeze.

I started using the app in 2012. I still use it.

I'm under the impression it's the best nutrition tracking app.

I've moved on to iHealth for tracking weight and exercise amounts, which I used MyFitnessPal in the past. This information is still in MyFitnessPal, and I will sometimes look at the graphs there, but not often. Apple Watch and a Bluetooth scale are great for the quantified self.

I didn't think MyFitnessPal was good enough either so I started working on a chatbot that you can just tell it what you ate in natural language and it will maintain a private web journal for you. I got a basic version to work and then discovered [Nutritionix][1] and lost motivation to compete. They seem to have nailed to web UI part. And they have an NLP input form you can use in the app. So it isn't the same as just texting a bot since you have to open the app, but the NLP is pretty good. And the UI for verifying what the NLP comes up with is also good. After researching every app I could find in this space Nutrionix stands as my favorite.

[1]: https://www.nutritionix.com/app

MFP is extremely limited when it comes to tracking micronutrients. If all you care about are very basic facts it's alright.

If you care about much more then Cronometer is commonly considered the best.

Co-sign your cronometer rec. Once I cared about my health, for real, it was the obvious choice.

thanks! cronometer founder here :-) my indie hackers interview for anyone that cares: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/03874047f2

Awesome, I didn't realize you did an interview! I have a ton of respect for the high standards you've been maintaining with data quality, keep it up.

Cronometer and Carb manager are better

Agreed! I always like FatSecret's Calorie Counter app better. MFP always felt bloated and glitchy.

> MFP always felt bloated

There is a joke in there somewhere.

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