Fitness App Will Add New Feature to Track Physical Health and Food Intake

Over 50 million people use MyFitnessPal, a free app that allows you to log your meals daily to help track your caloric intake as well as the kinds of food you're eating. Now, the developers plan to add a feature that will revolutionize fitness apps.

The app was designed to act as a food diary to help people record meals so they can monitor their diet and cut out whatever was causing weight gain. Along with tracking your caloric intake per day, it incorporates your workout information to arrive at a net total for your calories.

The free membership for the app includes your own personal food database, a searchable food database with nearly four million items, a personalized diet profile, and flexibility for the incorporation of other diets such as the South Beach Diet.

MyFitnessPal will further their efforts and add a feature to track one's steps each day, says CEO Mike Lee, who created the program nine years ago as a desktop app. By tracking this statistic, the app could encourage people to be more active once they're aware how many calories they lose per an amount of steps. The average MyFitnessPal user loses ten pounds per month approximately, and that number could very well increase with the app's new feature.

The feature is called Steps, and will track steps directly from the iPhone 5S. It will also sync data that comes from fitness activity devices that one wears on their wrist, such as Fitbit tracker bands or Nike Fuelbands. This might encourage users to purchase fitness bands so they can combine all pertinent fitness information via MyFitnessApp to maximize physical health.

"The amount of data you have available to you is going to grow exponentially," said Mr. Lee in this Forbes.com article. "What's exciting is what you can do with that data in the future."

On top of the new Steps feature, Lee hopes to start providing recommendations based on what people record into the app, specifically what you should eat based on your diet diary. The goal for MyFitnessApp is to become one of the first comprehensive windows into an individual's health.