You may have seen some news regarding a study MyFitnessPal recently did with UCLA.
I wanted to take a minute to address this study, since we participated in it directly. We are excited that we got to work with some very smart people to answer a question we also wanted to know the answer to. We jumped at the opportunity to find out—is having your physician introduce you to the app and help you sign up enough to kickstart a health journey?
What we learned is that just introducing people to MyFitnessPal wasn’t enough. People have to be ready and willing to do the hard work.
The app itself does work—if you use it. Our own data and the data from the study show that the more you log on, the more you use the app, the more success you will see. Users that logged in the most lost the most weight. In fact, we already know that 88% of users who log for 7 days lose weight.
We make tools designed to make it as clear and simple as possible for you to see the path to achieving your fitness goals. We are not, however, making a magic bullet—because there is no magic bullet. Ultimately, you’re the one who has to do the work.
And my, how much work you guys have done.
You have:
- lost over 180 million pounds
- logged over 14.5 billion foods
- burned 364 billion calories
- supported each other with over 82 million status likes in the last year alone
- and much more!
The first thing I say when people talk to me about MyFitnessPal is that user success is our true North. We are relentlessly focused on user success. We believe that if you are succeeding at reaching your goals then we will succeed as a company. We’re going to keep working to make our app even more accessible, simple to use, and motivating so we can help even more people succeed.
Of course, it’s our job to make the app as engaging and easy to use as possible. It’s not exactly where we want to be, yet. But we’ll keep working hard to get there. To that end, we’ve made lots of updates since this study was done. From a product perspective, in the last year and a half we’ve:
- streamlined the logging experience
- made logging streaks more visible
- added more ways to get push notifications and reminders
- added insights to help you get more out of logging
- made a recipe tool that allows you to quickly log recipes from anywhere across the web
As long as you keep working on your goals, we’re going to work on better ways to help you get there.
Thanks for everything you do, making the MyFitnessPal community so amazing, and helping us toward our vision of making an even healthier world.
