Are you trying to bring your weight down? Have you heard of the popular new app named MyFitnessPal, the diet tracker? You can find out what it is and how it works in the book of "Tracker: How Technology is helping Us Monitor & Improve Our Health," wriiten by Richard MacManus, the founder of ReadWrite. In the book he talks about the app created by Mike Lee that has assisted millions of individuals to control their weight.
Basically, it's a kind of app that can do barcode scanning on the bar coded food and ingredients you eat to give you information on its calories and record them into its database so that you know how many calories you will consume before you eat. Based on that you will make your own adjustments on what to eat and not or what to reduce its consumption and what to add.
MyFitnessApp was recently bought by Under Armour for $475 million and now everyone can buy the app on any digital bookstores such as Kindle.
It was in the middle of 2003 when a Silicon Valley marketing executive, the 32-year-old Mike Lee, and his fiancee were trying to look for a way to look better on his wedding day later on in the same year by bringing down their weight. They met a private health trainer at a local gym named 24 Hour Fitness. The trainer taught them to write down all they eat in a notebook and start to count their food calories. He also gave them a book about calorie counts for 3000 kinds of food.
As we know it, Lee worked in Silicon Valley and dealt with digital stuff every single day. He didn't like to do the conventional way of dieting and workouts, so he thought there must have been a digital way to manage someone's weight. Then he browsed online and found some calorie counters with their suggested foods, but the foods were hard to find in the market and for that reason it didn't work. They then got married without being successful in getting their ideal weight.
A little while after their wedding, using the programming skills and experiences Lee had acquired since he was 10, he started to develop his app that would later on be named MyFitnessPal. The idea is to remember what foods people eat the most as people normally eat the same kind of food repeatedly. That's what an ideal online counter should be: to know how often someone eats particular kinds of food. The app was launched in September 2005 and by August 2009 he quit his day job and together with his brother Al he dedicated much of his time to open an app company, as MyFitnessPal had become increasingly popular. Then in the same year the app for the first time went mobile and was applicable to iPhones and some other smartphones, and the rest is history.
