Last tested: April 2026 | Independent review — not sponsored | We tested this ourselves so you don’t have to

MyFitnessPal Review: 5 Things Nobody Tells You

MyFitnessPal gets recommended constantly — by PTs, Reddit threads, NHS weight loss guides, and every fitness influencer who’s ever held a camera. And fair enough, because on the surface it does exactly what it says: tracks your food, counts your calories, and shows you where your macros are going. For a lot of people, it genuinely changes things. But there’s a gap between what the app promises and what it actually delivers in daily use — and most reviews skip straight past it.

We’ve been using MyFitnessPal properly for several months — not just signing up, poking around, and writing a verdict. We mean logging every meal, testing the barcode scanner on UK supermarket products, connecting it to wearables, digging into the premium tier, and watching where it falls apart under real conditions. What we found was a genuinely useful app with some serious blind spots that nobody in the glossy review roundups seems willing to talk about. This review covers those blind spots — and whether the app is still worth your time despite them.

Whether you’re trying to lose a stone before summer, dial in your protein intake for muscle gain, or just get a clearer picture of what you’re actually eating — this is the honest answer on whether MyFitnessPal will actually help you do it.

What Is MyFitnessPal?

MyFitnessPal is a calorie and nutrition tracking app that launched back in 2005 and has since become arguably the most recognised name in the space. It’s owned by Francisco Partners (having previously been part of Under Armour), and sits on a database of over 14 million foods — user-submitted, verified, and branded entries combined. The core function is simple: you log what you eat, the app does the maths, and you get a clear picture of whether you’re hitting, exceeding, or falling short of your calorie and macro targets.

On top of food logging, MyFitnessPal tracks exercise, syncs with a wide range of wearables and third-party apps, and offers a community forum element that some users find useful. The free version covers the basics reasonably well. Premium unlocks macro customisation, a food analysis dashboard, meal planning tools, and removes the adverts. It’s available on iOS and Android, with a web dashboard too — which matters if you’re logging on a laptop at work rather than fumbling with your phone at the kitchen counter.

In the UK context, MyFitnessPal is one of the few calorie tracking apps that has genuinely solid coverage of British supermarket own-brand products — though as we’ll get into shortly, “solid coverage” doesn’t mean “reliable coverage.” If you’ve been comparing it with behaviour-change apps like Noom, it’s worth reading our independent Noom review — the two apps sit in very different camps philosophically, and what works for one person won’t work for another.

Key Features

The Food Database — Size Matters, But So Does Accuracy

This is MyFitnessPal’s headline feature and its biggest selling point: over 14 million food entries. For most branded UK products — your Tesco Finest ready meals, your Quaker Oats, your Greggs sausage rolls — you’ll find an entry. The barcode scanner works well the majority of the time on UK supermarket packaging, and it’s fast. Point, scan, confirm — ten seconds and you’re done.

The problem is the user-submitted entries. Because a huge chunk of the database is crowdsourced, you’ll regularly encounter duplicate entries with different calorie counts for the same product, or entries where someone’s clearly guessed the macros. We tested a Sainsbury’s Be Good To Yourself chicken wrap and found three different entries with calorie counts ranging from 290 to 410kcal. That’s a 41% variance. If you’re seriously trying to manage your intake, that kind of error compounds over days and weeks into something that matters.

Macro Tracking and Nutrient Breakdown

Once you’re past the free tier, MyFitnessPal gives you proper macro control. You can set custom protein, carbohydrate, and fat targets as percentages or fixed gram amounts — which is far more useful than the default percentage splits the app starts you on (which are conservative at best, counterproductive at worst for anyone trying to build muscle). The nutrient dashboard on Premium also breaks down micronutrients including sodium, potassium, vitamins, and fibre, which is genuinely useful if you’re training hard or managing a health condition.

Free users get calorie totals and a basic macro split, but they’re locked out of the custom targets. That’s a meaningful limitation — it’s the difference between knowing you’re eating 2,200 calories and knowing whether your 160g of protein target is actually being hit.

Barcode Scanner

The barcode scanner is one of those features that sounds mundane until you’ve actually used it daily. Rather than searching for “Aldi chicken breast fillets 500g” and wading through fifteen results, you scan the packet and the app pulls the entry directly. It works reliably on most major UK supermarket products. Where it falls down is on smaller brands, local products, and anything without a registered barcode in the system — which happens more than you’d think with UK-specific health food brands, gym supplement companies, and anything from a local butcher or deli counter.

When the scanner fails to find an entry, you can add it manually. That works, but it slows the whole process down and removes the convenience that makes the app sticky in the first place.

Wearable and App Integration

MyFitnessPal integrates with a genuinely impressive list of platforms: Fitbit, Garmin, Apple Health, Google Fit, Withings, and more. When it works properly, exercise data from your wearable syncs across and adjusts your remaining calorie allowance for the day. In theory, this creates a closed loop where your food intake and energy expenditure are both tracked in one place.

In practice, the calorie adjustments can be wildly inaccurate — not because of MyFitnessPal specifically, but because wearables overestimate calorie burn, and MFP adds those inflated exercise calories straight onto your daily target. We found this pushed our daily calorie target up by 300–500kcal on training days, which sounds helpful until you realise that eating back inflated exercise calories is a fast route to a stall in progress. You learn to ignore the adjustment, which defeats part of the purpose.

Calorie Goal Setting

This is one of the things nobody warns you about. MyFitnessPal sets your calorie goal based on height, weight, age, activity level, and your stated goal (lose, maintain, or gain). The formula is fine — it’s based on standard TDEE calculations. The problem is the activity level definitions are vague, and most people select “lightly active” when they’re actually sedentary, or “active” when they mean they go to the gym three times a week. The resulting calorie target can be 200–300kcal off before you’ve even started.

The deeper issue is that MFP’s default calorie targets tend to be lower than many people need — especially women, who often get served targets in the 1,200–1,400kcal range that nutrition professionals widely consider too low for sustainable progress. The app doesn’t push back on this. It just gives you the number. You need to know enough to question it.

Meal Planning and Recipe Import

Premium users can save meals and create custom recipes, which is where the app starts earning its subscription cost for anyone who meal preps. You build a recipe once — say, your standard chicken and rice prep — assign your portion sizes, and log it in three taps next time. The recipe importer can also pull nutritional data from a URL, which works well with major recipe websites and badly with anything on a personal blog or smaller site. Useful when it works, frustrating when it doesn’t.

How MyFitnessPal Compares to the Competition

We tested MyFitnessPal against its two closest UK-relevant rivals — Cronometer and Nutracheck:

Feature	MyFitnessPal	Cronometer	Nutracheck
Food Database Size	14 million+	~1 million (verified)	~250,000 (UK-focused)
UK Supermarket Coverage	✅ Good	❌ Limited	✅ Excellent
Database Accuracy	⚠️ Variable (crowdsourced)	✅ High (verified entries)	✅ High (UK-verified)
Barcode Scanner	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	✅ Yes
Micronutrient Tracking	Premium only	✅ Free (detailed)	✅ Included
Wearable Integration	✅ Extensive	✅ Good	⚠️ Limited
Free Tier Usability	⚠️ Moderate	✅ Strong	⚠️ Limited
Custom Macro Targets	Premium only	✅ Free	✅ Included
Premium Price (per year)	£79.99	~£35/year	~£39.99/year
Community Features	✅ Active forums	❌ Minimal	❌ Minimal

Pros and Cons

Pricing

MyFitnessPal runs a freemium model. Here’s the honest breakdown of what each tier actually gets you:

Free

You get access to the food database, the barcode scanner, basic calorie tracking, and a simple macro split display. You can log exercise manually or sync a wearable. The free tier is functional, but it’s deliberately limited in ways designed to push you towards Premium. The adverts are persistent, custom macro targets are locked, and the nutrient breakdown is surface-level. For a complete beginner who just wants to start paying attention to their intake, it’s fine. For anyone who takes their training or nutrition seriously, the free version will frustrate you within a fortnight.

Premium — £15.99/month or £79.99/year

Premium removes adverts, unlocks custom macro and calorie targets (including per-meal targets), expands the nutrient dashboard to include full micronutrient data, adds food analysis tools, and enables the meal planning and recipe import features. The annual plan works out at roughly £6.67/month, which is where it starts to make financial sense. The monthly plan at £15.99 is hard to justify when Cronometer charges roughly £35 for an entire year and gives you better macro customisation on its free tier.

The honest answer: if you’re going to pay for MyFitnessPal, pay annually. The monthly rate is a poor value proposition. And if you’re comparing it to paying for a PT or a structured programme, it’s still cheap — but it’s noticeably more expensive than the competition for what you get.

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Who Is MyFitnessPal Best For?

Our Verdict

MyFitnessPal is the most well-known calorie tracking app for a reason — it’s genuinely useful, broadly compatible, and for many people it’s the first tool that makes the abstract concept of “eating better” feel concrete and manageable. The database is vast, the barcode scanner is fast, and when the data is right, the tracking experience is smooth. We’ve seen people use this app to lose serious weight and finally understand their nutrition after years of guessing. That’s not nothing.

But the honest version of this review has to acknowledge the problems, because they’re not minor. The database accuracy issue isn’t a niche edge case — it affects daily logging for anyone eating UK-specific products that haven’t been officially verified. The default calorie goals are genuinely problematic for a lot of users, particularly women. And locking custom macro targets behind a Premium paywall that costs more than competing apps that include the feature for free is a commercial decision that doesn’t serve users. The exercise calorie adjustment issue is something the app has been criticised for for years and still hasn’t properly addressed.

Our rating of 7.8/10 reflects an app that’s very good at the core job but has specific, fixable problems that the developers seem unwilling to fix — probably because the free tier’s limitations are deliberate conversion tools rather than oversights. If you go in with clear eyes about the database accuracy issue (learn to cross-reference entries), ignore the exercise calorie adjustments, and pay for the annual Premium plan if you’re serious, MyFitnessPal is still one of the best tracking tools available. Just don’t expect it to be perfect, and don’t take its numbers as gospel.

Category	Score
Value for Money	7/10
Features	8/10
Ease of Use	8/10
Database Accuracy	6/10
UK Availability	9/10
Overall	7.8/10

If you’re building a broader fitness routine alongside your nutrition tracking, it’s worth knowing that MyFitnessPal plays well with structured workout apps too. We’ve done a thorough breakdown in our Jefit vs Strong comparison — both integrate with MFP and give you a proper training tracker to sit alongside your calorie data.

Get Started with MyFitnessPal Today →

Frequently Asked Questions

Is MyFitnessPal free to use in the UK?

Yes, MyFitnessPal has a free tier available in the UK that covers basic calorie and food logging, the barcode scanner, and simple macro tracking. However, the free version has significant limitations — custom macro targets, full nutrient breakdowns, and meal planning tools are locked behind the Premium subscription. Free users also see adverts throughout the app. It’s usable for beginners, but the most important features require payment.

Is MyFitnessPal Premium worth it?

If you’re serious about hitting specific macro targets or you meal prep regularly, Premium earns its cost — particularly on the annual plan at roughly £6.67/month. The custom macro targets alone justify it for anyone tracking protein intake for muscle gain or fat loss. However, if you’re a casual user who just wants to be vaguely aware of your calories, the free tier is probably sufficient and the Premium price is hard to justify compared to cheaper rivals like Cronometer or Nutracheck.

How accurate is the MyFitnessPal food database?

Accuracy varies significantly. Verified entries from major food brands and official sources are generally reliable. User-submitted entries — which make up a large portion of the 14 million total — are frequently inaccurate, with multiple conflicting entries for the same product being common. For UK users, it’s worth cross-referencing entries for home-cooked dishes or less common products against the packaging or a verified source. Don’t take every calorie count as precise truth.

Does MyFitnessPal work with Fitbit and Apple Watch?

Yes — MyFitnessPal integrates with Fitbit, Apple Health (and therefore Apple Watch), Garmin, Google Fit, and a range of other wearables and health platforms. The integration syncs exercise and step data across to adjust your daily calorie target. Be aware that these exercise calorie adjustments often inflate your target based on wearable estimates of calorie burn, which many fitness professionals consider unreliable. We’d recommend treating the adjustment as directional rather than precise.

What’s the difference between MyFitnessPal and Noom?

They’re solving different problems. MyFitnessPal is primarily a calorie and macro tracking tool — it’s neutral, data-focused, and puts you in control of your targets. Noom is a behaviour-change programme built around psychology and coaching, with food tracking as one component. MyFitnessPal gives you data; Noom tries to change your relationship with food. MyFitnessPal is cheaper at the annual tier; Noom is significantly more expensive. Which works depends entirely on whether you need data or you need guidance.