Did you make a New Year’s Resolution to lose weight? If you’ve been struggling to meet your goals, it’s probably because of the “usual suspects”. Keeping track of how many calories your food is, how much you exercise, and what categories of food you need to cut back on is hard to do with pen and paper. My new favorite fitness app is Under Armor’s My Fitness Pal.

My favorite use of this app is to keep track of how many calories I eat at each meal. There were so many foods I was eating that seemed healthy but were filled with sodium and sugar. The app lets you separate meals and add up the calories for each thing you eat. For homemade foods, you enter your recipe and it tells you how many calories it is per serving. For prepared foods, just scan the bar code and choose how many servings you ate. Once you enter that information, it calculates how many calories and macronutrients you received from that food.

The exercise component of this app makes it feel more like a game. Once you select the type of exercise you completed it adds those calories to your daily allowance. If you make healthy choice you’ll end every day with a deficit. After a week of using this app I lost 3 pounds.

I find this app is a helpful to add to your arsenal of things to help you live a more healthful life. This is a free app, so downloaded it and see how easy it is to get results.