Chapter Three

Diet Wars: tracking food with MyFitnessPal

There isn’t some kind of rigid plan that we ask people to do. It’s not like you can never have a piece of chocolate cake again. It’s about making your own decisions about what you eat and understanding that there are big ramifications.

— Mike Lee, founder of MyFitnessPal

It was the summer of 2003 and Mike Lee, a 32-year-old Silicon Valley marketing executive, was looking forward to his wedding day later that year. The only trouble was, he had put on weight over the summer and didn’t want to walk down the aisle with a pudgy tummy. His fiancée also wanted to lose some weight before the big day, so the couple went to see a personal fitness trainer at their local gym, 24-Hour Fitness. At the end of the first session, after Mike Lee and his fiancée had sweated off maybe half a pound, the trainer handed them a small book. It contained calorie counts for about 3,000 foods. “You need to start counting your calories,” the trainer advised, tapping the book. “Write down everything that you eat in a notebook.”

Mike Lee is a veteran of Silicon Valley. In the early 2000s, he’d worked for Handspring, a manufacturer of PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) that went on to merge with Palm in 2003. PDAs were the precursor of the modern smartphone — some of you will remember the Palm Pilot from the early 2000s — and so Lee had gotten an early entry into the world of mobile communications. His first reaction to being told to count calories on paper? There’s got to be a digital method! So he immediately threw the calorie counting book away and looked for an online solution. Lee looked at over a dozen existing online calorie counters in the summer of 2003. There was no shortage of online solutions. “But to my amazement,” Lee recalled nearly a decade later, “none of them worked the way I thought they should work.”

The first thing Mike Lee wanted to change about 2003-era calorie counters was the user experience, which he found frustrating. Many foods were either not available in these products, and so had to be manually input, or if they were available then they were hard to find. “When I was trying to use other products back then,” Lee told me over the phone in mid-2013, “the user interfaces were just really cringe-y.” He concluded that it was actually easier to write down calorie counts on paper than to use these online products. The second thing he noticed was the lack of intelligence in the online calorie counters of 2003. A simple yet powerful notion, which would become a key feature of MyFitnessPal, was to remember the foods you eat the most. “People tend to eat the same things fairly often,” Lee told me, adding that his own breakfast “doesn’t vary that much.” So he reasoned that an online calorie counter “should just remember what you eat most often and make that easy for you.”

Mike Lee left Palm in October 2004 and it was at that point that he began development work on MyFitnessPal. “I started building the diet tracker I really wanted, because I finally had the time to sit down and build it,” he told me. It was also a good chance to brush up on his programing skills, being a long-time computing enthusiast and amateur programmer. “I had done a ton of programing when I was young,” he said. “I’d started at ten and programed all the way through high school and college. But it had been a long time ago.”

So it was that MyFitnessPal was born, as a side project in 2004 for a slightly overweight Silicon Valley executive. It was officially launched less than a year later, in September 2005. From there it grew into something far beyond a hobby for Mike Lee. By the summer of 2013, MyFitnessPal had attracted over 40 million users and had become the leading calorie counter on the market. But to truly appreciate the scale of what Mike Lee built, we first have to go back to the 1970s — when food tracking was undergoing a revolution.

Diet wars, part I

Calorie counting has had many ups and downs over the years. It’s been the subject of furious debates: is it useful at all; how should it be done; are fats more important to track; are carbohydrates the key metric?

Let’s start with the basics. What exactly is a calorie and what does it measure? A calorie is a unit of energy. Many of the hundreds of different diets through the years have boiled down to this basic formula: the amount of energy you consume from food must be less than the amount of energy you expend through activity. In other words, the number of calories you eat in a day must be lower than the calories you use up with activity in order for you to lose weight. It was a simple formula and it led to the calorie becoming the default measure of food tracking.

But from the early 1970s, the science of food tracking became more complicated. Dieting became a craze in the 1970s and, in a frantic bid to differentiate themselves, self-proclaimed diet doctors came up with a dizzying number of new theories about how the body processes food. These theories revolved around the three basic components of food: fat, protein, and carbohydrates. Fat and carbohydrates in particular would divide the medical establishment and lead to years of controversy in food tracking.

At first the calorie was still the ultimate food-tracking metric. But the key question became: was it better to minimize calories through controlling fat intake, or carbohydrates? There was a seemingly simple answer to that too. Of the three basic components of food, fat has by far the most calories per gram. According to the American Heart Association (AHA), every one gram of fat is equivalent to nine calories. That makes it over twice as calorie-heavy as carbohydrates and protein, both of which have four calories per gram. The AHA makes it very clear on its website which of the three food components it believes is worst for you:

Because fats are so energy-dense, consuming high levels of fat — regardless of the type — can lead to taking in too many calories. That can lead to weight gain or being overweight. Consuming high levels of saturated or trans fats can also lead to heart disease and stroke.

So not only does a high-fat diet lead to weight problems, according to the AHA, it can lead to heart disease too. That double whammy logic became the foundation of conventional diet programs in the 1970s and 1980s. The key to controlling your calorie intake was to restrict the amount of fat you consumed — that became the accepted wisdom. This approach came to be known as the low-fat diet.

But not everyone subscribed to the low-fat theory. In 1972 Dr. Robert Atkins published his first book, Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution. It followed on from an article in American Vogue magazine in 1970, which caused a sensation in the dieting world. Bucking the conventional thinking of the day, Dr. Atkins was recommending a low-carbohydrate approach to dieting. His basic reasoning was that many of the most common foods in the Western diet — breads, grains, starchy vegetables like potatoes — are very high in carbohydrates and therefore high in calories. He also argued that eating a diet high in carbohydrates stimulated appetite. In other words, the more carbs you eat, the hungrier you get and the more calories you consume in a day.

What Dr. Atkins was advocating was a low-carb diet, which meant that you necessarily had to increase the amount of fats and protein in your diet (if you didn’t, you simply wouldn’t get enough energy). But this approach had a PR problem: the conventional wisdom that a diet high in fats also meant high in calories. To get around this, Dr. Atkins made a rule for his new diet: “don’t count calories.” Instead, he advised dieters to focus on eating “allowed” foods — low-carb foods like steak, eggs, and non-starchy vegetables. High-carbohydrate foods like potatoes, pasta, and breads were forbidden. For followers of the Atkins diet, calorie tracking was put on the back burner.

Dr. Atkins’ diet became popular, simply because it worked: people rapidly lost weight on it. But at what long-term cost? Dr. Atkins was a combative personality and he had developed an intense dislike for the medical establishment since becoming a doctor in the 1950s. His high-fat diet immediately attracted critics in the 1970s. The primary argument against Dr. Atkins was that his diet might help you lose weight in the short term, but it was bad for you in the long run. The high level of fat and protein would lead to heart disease and might also aggravate kidney problems, many physicians maintained.

One of Atkins’ most vociferous critics was Dr. Nathan Pritikin, who had actually suffered from heart disease. In 1956, at the age of 41, Dr. Pritikin was diagnosed with coronary artery disease. His total cholesterol reading was over 300 mg/dL, a dangerously high level. He then started a low-fat diet that was high in carbohydrates, and he began running regularly. By January 1960 his total cholesterol was down to 120 mg/dL and he no longer had signs of heart disease. Based on this experience, Dr. Pritikin co-authored a best-selling diet book entitled The Pritikin Program for Diet and Exercise. First published in 1979, the book outlined a diet that was “low in fats, cholesterol, protein and highly refined carbohydrates, such as sugars.” Conversely, the diet was “high in starches, as part of complex, mostly unrefined carbohydrates.” In practical terms, that meant the Pritikin diet was made up of vegetables, potatoes, pastas, breads, and fruit. Small portions of meat were allowed, but not encouraged. Pritikin himself was a vegetarian.

The dietary views of Dr. Atkins and Dr. Pritikin were diametrically opposed. Dr. Atkins was pushing a high-fat, low-carb, meat-heavy approach; Dr. Pritikin advocated a low-fat, high-carb, plant-based diet. Despite the huge gulf in food types recommended by each diet, the Atkins and Pritikin diets did have one thing in common: neither encouraged calorie counting!

Followers of the Pritikin diet were told that there were no restrictions on food quantity: “You can eat as much as you like of many of the permissible foods. All day long, if you wish.” Meanwhile, Atkins dieters were told they could have “unrestricted” amounts of meat, fish and shellfish, fowl and eggs (with just a few warnings on certain foods in those wide food groups, such as oysters — which did contain “some carbohydrates”). So during the 1970s and right through to the mid-90s, calorie counting simply wasn’t fashionable. In both the popular low-fat diet and the more controversial low-carb approach, calorie counting was discouraged. It was all about which food types you could eat — and generally speaking you didn’t need to track how much of those foods you ate.

That’s not to say that calories weren’t still important. Both Atkins and Pritikin believed that weight loss still essentially boiled down to reducing your daily caloric intake. But the two diet doctors had to differentiate their respective diets, from each other and from an increasingly competitive diet marketplace. They also needed a promotional angle that would appeal to a mass audience. The solution for both men was very similar in style, if not the particulars. They simply told their respective followers to eat as much as they liked of the “allowed” foods. Pritikin told people to eat as many carbs as they liked, while Atkins gave the same message about fats. In an era of increasing consumption and sexual promiscuity — the 70s and the early 80s — the two diet doctors cleverly chose to appeal to the appetites of consumers. Eat as much as you like, they cried. Dr. Atkins even went so far as to crow that his program was much more appetizing. “The advantage of my diet is that it is fun,” he told People magazine in 1979. “My patients can eat meat or any other main course in whatever quantity they wish, and they never go hungry.”

With this background in food tracking, you may be wondering if MyFitnessPal founder Mike Lee had the right motivation in developing a calorie counter in 2004. After all, haven’t we just seen that calorie counting isn’t necessarily the way to a dieter’s heart? But the question is moot, because what Lee ended up building tracked more than just calories. It also enabled people to track intake of fats, carbohydrates, protein, salt levels, sugar, and much more. Mike Lee left it up to his users to choose what they tracked. He just gave them the right tool.

MyFitnessPal goes mobile

In August 2009, after five years of part-time work building up MyFitnessPal, Mike Lee finally decided to take the big step and quit his day job. His brother Al Lee also joined him as a full-time employee of MyFitnessPal. It was to be a turning point for the young company. It was also a key period for the consumer health technology market. As we saw in the previous chapter, it was the year that the Fitbit activity tracker began shipping. Other health-focused websites and apps began to appear too. The primary reason for the increased popularity of health apps like Fitbit and MyFitnessPal in 2009 was the smartphone.

The second half of 2008 saw two milestones on the Internet landscape, which ultimately propelled the smartphone into the limelight. Following on from the launch of the first-generation iPhone in 2007, in July 2008 Apple launched the second-generation (dubbed the iPhone 3G) and — just as importantly — an App Store. The first Android-powered smartphone to be released came just a few months later, in October 2008. So coming into the New Year, 2009, the market was primed for a new way to use the Internet: smartphone apps. In an August 2009 blog post announcing that he and Al were devoting themselves to MyFitnessPal full-time, Mike Lee noted that they were already working on “an iPhone app which we modestly think will be the best calorie counting app in the app store.” The iPhone app was duly launched in December 2009 and it led to a surge in popularity for MyFitnessPal. Like many health-related Internet products, MyFitnessPal was a perfect match for the smartphone. “You want to be tracking when you’re actually eating,” explained Mike Lee in our 2013 interview, “and that’s when you’re out and about. So, mobile was critical to us.”

I was a relative latecomer to MyFitnessPal. I started to use it in early 2013, when I began a new diet — a low-carb one, as it happens. I used the MyFitnessPal iPhone app to enter my food for a period of about three months. I focused mainly on counting carbohydrate intake each day, since that was what my new diet required. But I found myself interested in all of the different food data, for comparative reasons. For example, I could compare the calories that MyFitnessPal said I consumed with the calories that Fitbit said I expended. Every time I ate something, it took a couple of minutes at most to enter the data into MyFitnessPal.

I don’t think I would have used the product at all if it wasn’t for the mobile app. It would have been too much of a hassle for me to open my computer and enter the data multiple times a day. But I carry my smartphone around with me everywhere, so it was easy to track my food intake. That, in a nutshell, is why MyFitnessPal became so popular in 2010 and beyond: it was a killer smartphone app waiting to happen.

It became even easier when MyFitnessPal added barcode scanning to its Android app in November 2010 (the iPhone app got this in July 2011). The feature uses the smartphone’s camera to take a photo of a product barcode, which the MyFitnessPal app would attempt to match to a product in its food database. If a match was found, which in my experience was more often than not, the food would be automatically added to your meal. In my discussions with Mike Lee, I was somewhat surprised to learn that the data doesn’t come from the food manufacturers. “We don’t go direct to the food manufacturers to get the food data, in most cases,” said Lee. Rather, it is crowdsourced. In other words, MyFitnessPal’s users upload the data and check it for accuracy.

One of the items I scanned into my food log every now and then was Kraft’s Philadelphia Regular Cream Cheese Spread. The calorie, carb, fat and other nutrition data for this product was member-submitted. It had “two confirmations” when I last checked, meaning that two people had reviewed the data against the product’s label and deemed it correct. It’s easy enough to check yourself, since many countries legally require food manufacturers to have a nutrition facts label on the packaging. The one thing to be wary of is that some nutrition labels can be misleading or wrong. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) states on its website: “Manufacturers are responsible for the accuracy of the nutrition labeling values on their products.” The FDA does random sampling for accuracy and it will prosecute violations, but it simply doesn’t have the resources to check everything.

The barcode scanning feature led to more MyFitnessPal users adding data to an already impressive database of food information. MyFitnessPal’s food database has been critical to its success over the years. Mike Lee realized very early on that in a food tracking app, there’s nothing more frustrating for a user than not finding an item — because then they’d need to check the food packaging and manually input the data. What should be a quick one-minute update becomes a five or even ten-minute time suck. So top of mind for Mike Lee when he began developing MyFitnessPal in 2004 was building up a large food database.

He began by manually adding the data himself, using product information from food manufacturers and retailers where available. In September 2007, Lee blogged: “Last night, I was able to add nutritional information for the entire Starbucks menu and all Amy’s Kitchen products to the food database. My goal is to more than triple the size of the current food database by the end of the year.” But he also realized that MyFitnessPal would only truly scale if he called on his users to help. In other words, crowdsource it by enabling MyFitnessPal’s users to input and check data. The alternatives were to get the data from open food nutrition databases or directly pipe it from food manufacturers. However, there wasn’t a comprehensive open database of barcodes that MyFitnessPal could tap into and getting the data from food manufacturers was far too much work. Besides, if their own users entered the data then MyFitnessPal would own it.

One of the defining characteristics of so-called “social” software — like Facebook and Twitter — is that the value of the business is almost all derived from the amount and quality of user data in its databases. MyFitnessPal is no exception, so Mike Lee was very smart to go the crowdsourcing route. Everything its users enter into MyFitnessPal’s food database belongs to MyFitnessPal.

Still, it was no easy task to build up the food database. If he wasn’t adding new foods himself, Mike Lee spent his time checking the accuracy on user submissions. It was a chicken-and-egg situation in 2005 when MyFitnessPal launched because there needed to be enough food data to grow its user base, but there was a danger that early users would be frustrated by lack of data and immediately quit.

Lee got around this dilemma with some ingenious solutions, such as letting MyFitnessPal’s earliest users check data accuracy with just one click of a button. This was the birth of the “confirmations” mentioned earlier, in the Kraft cream cheese example. If a user came across a food that had member-supplied data, next to it was a message (Is this data accurate?) along with two buttons (yes and no).

Fortunately for Mike Lee, enough of the early users glanced down to their food packaging to check the MyFitnessPal data. So gradually, from 2005 onward, the MyFitnessPal database began to fill out. MyFitnessPal has come a long way since 2005. Nowadays, with tens of millions of users, it has built-in quality control. “We have a million QA people now,” Lee said, chuckling … probably with relief that he no longer needs to check the data himself.

Diet wars, part II

When we left our two diet doctors, Dr. Atkins and Dr. Pritikin, they were both espousing an “all you can eat” approach to their followers. There were many diets to choose from during this period, the late 70s and early 80s, including wacky ones such as fruitarian and the cabbage soup diet (the names tell you all you need to know about what you could eat). But the Atkins and Pritikin programs represented the two main approaches to dieting.

Of the two, the low-fat diet epitomized by Pritikin had the huge advantage of adhering to conventional wisdom. As a result, despite the efforts of the voluble Dr. Robert Atkins, the low-fat diet dominated right through the 80s and into the 90s. Standards organizations such as the American Heart Association (AHA) and American Diabetes Association (ADA) strongly advocated the low-fat approach (most of them still do, to this day). As for calorie counting, it was still practiced — but it was widely viewed as more important to monitor the fat content of foods. Fat counts, not calories, was the metric of the day.

In the mid-90s, carbohydrates became the focus again thanks to the Glycemic Index. Created in 1981 by Dr. Thomas Wolever and Dr. David Jenkins at the University of Toronto, the Glycemic Index (usually abbreviated to GI) measures how quickly your blood sugar levels rise after eating carbohydrates. The index uses a scale from 0–100, with 100 equivalent to pure glucose. The lower the score for a particular food, the longer it takes for your body to process it. The theory is that low-glycemic foods better regulate your insulin levels, which in turn enables you to control your appetite. A score of 70 and above is considered high and means that your blood sugar level will rise very quickly after you eat. The staple breakfast cereal of cornflakes, for example, has a shockingly high GI level of 93. That means it’s almost the same as eating a bowl of white sugar for breakfast! On the other hand, boiled wholemeal spaghetti has a GI rating of 42. So it was foods such as this which made up low-glycemic diets, which became popular in the mid-1990s. The South Beach Diet is one of the better known low-GI diets still in use today.

The low-glycemic theory was similar to that of the low-carb diets of Dr. Atkins and others. The goal in both cases was to regulate your hormones, principally insulin, so that your blood sugar levels were under control and you won’t get hungry so often. Where the two dietary approaches differed was that low-glycemic foods are often still high in carbohydrates, which earned such foods the nickname of “good carbs.” It was the speed at which carbs were processed in your body, not the number of carbs, which was important for low-GI diets. Dr. Atkins rejected that theory — for him, there was no such thing as good carbs.

So-called “whole grains” became very fashionable in the 1990s and beyond for those on low-GI diets. Many of these foods, for example the wholemeal spaghetti mentioned above, were high in carbs but low GI. In effect, following a low-glycemic diet meant that you could eat a wider range of foods than on an Atkins style low-carb diet. In particular, you could eat grains and breads — as long as they were made from the wholesome-sounding “whole grains.” As a result of the GI, counting calories began to make a comeback in the mid to late 1990s. That’s because counting carbohydrates and fat was no longer sufficient to get a full picture of your daily food intake. Calorie counting by itself didn’t solve the problem either, so a common approach for diet doctors and weight-loss companies in the mid-90s onward was to create a proprietary “formula” that incorporated GI levels. Usually these formulas were founded on calories, which had the effect of making calorie counting trendy again. For example, Weight Watchers launched a points system in 1997 that was GI-friendly, but almost entirely based on calories (I’ll explore Weight Watchers in more detail in the next chapter, which is about tracking weight).

However, within a decade the calorie itself would come under pressure as a metric of food consumption. In 2007, science writer Gary Taubes published a book called Good Calories, Bad Calories. The book, weighing in at over 500 pages, argued that calorie counting was the wrong approach to understanding weight gain. Instead, wrote Taubes, it all came down to carbohydrate counting. He went further: over-consumption of carbohydrates was the primary cause of the obesity epidemic. He argued that the key to weight gain was insulin, the hormone in our bodies that regulates blood sugar levels. Taubes presented a very detailed analysis of medical research showing that if you eat high-carb foods, the body produces too much insulin, which leads to sugar levels rising rapidly, then falling just as rapidly, which in turn causes the body to crave more food — and so on, in a vicious circle. The upshot is weight gain. The solution? Eat fewer carbs. “The fewer carbohydrates we consume,” concluded Taubes, “the leaner we will be.”

Taubes’ book changed the way the diet industry thought about weight loss. It was the follow-up to a New York Times magazine article he’d written in 2002, which caused a sensation. Entitled “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?”, the article argued that the low-fat dietary approach endorsed by the American medical establishment over the past twenty years had been completely wrong-headed. Dr. Atkins had been right all along, the article stated. Unfortunately for Dr. Atkins, he didn’t live to benefit from this vindication. He died less than a year later, in April 2003 — ironically under a cloud of suspicion that he was obese at the time.

Sometimes it’s not the carbohydrates or calories that we’re concerned with when it comes to monitoring our health. Salt is a popular bad boy in the modern diet, because too much salt in our diet can raise blood pressure. Indeed, different diets emphasize different risks. The Paleo diet has become very trendy in the early part of the 21st century, as a movement against processed foods. It was named after the diet which our Paleolithic ancestors presumably would have eaten, over 10,000 years ago. Paleolithic hunter-gatherers subsisted on meat, vegetables and some fruit. So the Paleo diet outlaws any type of food that our ancestors would not have consumed. That means everything that the Neolithic agricultural revolution brought us, especially grains and sugars. The basic premise of the Paleo diet is that our bodies have not fully adapted to processed foods like grains and sugars, since for over 99% of the period of our evolution we haven’t consumed such foods.

Personally, I find the premise of the Paleo diet rather shaky. Yes, our ancestors 10,000 years ago got by just fine on this diet. But they also had a far lower life expectancy and, as hunter-gatherers, lived an entirely different way from us. Also, nobody really knows how our bodies evolve over time. In terms of its foods, the Paleo diet is similar to an Atkins-style diet in that much of it is low in carbohydrates. However, the Paleo diet is a lot more restrictive. For example, unlike most low-carb diets, the Paleo diet has deemed that legumes are bad. Legumes are foods that come from a pod and include beans, peas, lentils, soybeans and peanuts. So why are they bad? According to Loren Cordain, author of The Paleo Diet, “Most legumes in their mature state are non-digestible and/or toxic to most mammals when eaten in even moderate quantities.” Legumes are “non-digestible and/or toxic” because — like grains — they contain phytic acid, which prevents you from absorbing nutrients.

But different diets work for different people. As a type 1 diabetic, I found that a low-carb diet that regulates my blood sugar levels is best for me. However, I didn’t just start a low-carb diet and accept it as the best, even though there’s no shortage of books and websites telling me it is. Using MyFitnessPal and my blood glucose meter, I tracked the foods I ate over a period of a few months, paying special attention to the effect of carbohydrates on my body. So I didn’t just accept the literature, I tested for myself if the low-carb diet was effective for me.

Perhaps the Paleo diet will work better for you. Or maybe one of the low-fat diets still recommended to this day by the American Heart Association. Or vegetarianism. The purpose of my book is not to recommend any particular diet or course of action. It’s to emphasize that you should find out — of your own accord — what works best for you. Tracking your food intake is an effective way of doing that. By all means try out the latest fashionable diet, but make sure you track the results.

So what to count when you’re tracking your food intake? The short answer is that it depends on your diet. If you’re on a low-carb diet, then it obviously makes sense to keep track of your daily carbs. If you still like your wholegrain breads and Italian pasta dishes (and your body can process them well), then counting calories is a good way to go. As long as you realize that there isn’t an exact correlation between calories in and calories out. The food tracking tools of today cater for it all. While MyFitnessPal began as a simple calorie counter, it now also enables you to count your daily carbs, fat, protein, cholesterol, sodium, sugars, and fiber.

It all comes back to the power of knowledge. Tracking your food, at least for a short time, tells you what you’re putting into your body every day. Some of those measures will be more important to you than others. For me, carbs is what I focus on. I do keep an eye on calories too, but mainly because that allows me to cross-check my calories-in (food) with calories-out (activity) figures, which I can track with a pedometer device like Fitbit or Nike FuelBand.

Different strokes for different folks

When MyFitnessPal released its iPhone app in December 2009, it enabled people to track their food on the go. I asked founder Mike Lee what he’s learned since then about how to track food intake. The first thing a new MyFitnessPal user should do, replied Lee, is “track everything.” But it’s OK to estimate food data, he added: “It doesn’t have to be perfect. The most important thing is just keep tracking.” He also advises not to worry about missing the odd meal. “The more you do it,” he said about food tracking, “the easier it becomes and the more of a habit it becomes. Basically, the longer you stick with it, the more success you’re going to have.” Another tip Mike Lee offered is to enter your food before you eat, not after. That’s where the smartphone app really helps, because it takes a couple of minutes at most to enter this data. The benefit of doing it before you eat is that you can make adjustments if a food you’re about to consume is high in calories, or carbohydrates, or whatever your key metric is.

Some of the power users of MyFitnessPal use the app to plan their meals throughout the day, although many people will prefer less structure. Mike Lee himself prefers a more flexible approach. “There isn’t some kind of rigid plan that we ask people to do,” he told me. “It’s not like you can never have a piece of chocolate cake again. It’s about making your own decisions about what you eat and understanding that there are big ramifications.” In his own life, as a startup CEO, he often needs to go to industry events. Such events tend to serve nibbles along with alcohol and so are likely to push his calorie count up for that day. “So I’ll go lighter on lunch,” explained Lee, “or I’ll go for a run in the afternoon to try to burn off some extra calories.” So for Mike Lee, his app gives him an understanding of what tradeoffs he can make every day about his food and exercise mix. “It’s just really empowering,” he said. “You feel like you’re in control of what you want and goals that you’re trying to achieve and that’s kind of what I like about it.”

Ultimately the benefit of food tracking apps like MyFitnessPal is that they help you make better food choices, whatever flavor of diet you subscribe to. “Everybody can benefit from eating better,” Mike Lee remarked. “Until recently, we didn’t have the tools to make the [food] information we need easily accessible.” For example, Lee — who still uses calories as his primary measure — stopped using mayonnaise on his sandwiches after discovering how many calories it had. “One tablespoon of mayonnaise has 90 calories. Before I started calorie counting, I had no idea that was the case. Whereas mustard has five calories. So I just stopped using mayonnaise.” This is the kind of food knowledge, says Mike Lee, that stays with you and helps you make better daily decisions.

It’s important to note that it’s not scientific knowledge that Mike Lee is referring to, but self-knowledge. The diet industry is one of the most confusing and contradictory around. When two diametrically opposed diets — low fat and low carb — both have science “facts” to back them up, it’s no surprise that most people have little clue which foods are truly healthy. In the final analysis, food facts may not matter that much. Mike Lee to this day emphasizes calorie counting in his own ongoing weight maintenance plan, even though counting carbs is more in fashion now. Whichever metric you use, monitoring your food intake will at the very least make you more mindful of what you’re eating and the impact it has on your weight.

I myself agree with Dr. Atkins and Gary Taubes that it’s carbohydrates that ultimately lead to weight gain. That said, I don’t do a low-carb diet because of weight issues. I do it because I’m a type 1 diabetic and reducing carbohydrates is the most effective way for me to control my daily blood sugar levels. I have lost a bit of weight too, but if anything I’d prefer to put some of it back on. If I wasn’t a type 1 diabetic, then I probably wouldn’t be on a low-carb diet. I don’t have a tendency to put on a lot of weight, so I’d be able to get by on a regular carb-loaded diet if it wasn’t for my diabetes.

Atkins was a fairly big man, around 6 foot and 200 pounds. Taubes too is a big man, at 6 foot 3 inches and over 200 pounds. Atkins did the low-carb diet because it was his most effective way of losing weight and keeping it off. Taubes had a similar experience. But Nathan Pritikin — described in his biography as “a thin, wiry man, no more than five feet, eight inches tall” — did the complete opposite diet and he too managed to stay slim. Different strokes for different folks is a cliché that is apt here. It needn’t even be about one’s height or body shape. Perhaps it’s the way your body processes food.

A journalist friend of Gary Taubes, John Horgan from Scientific American magazine, follows a carb-heavy diet but has a lower BMI than Taubes: “I’m 1.85 meters [6 feet, 1 inch] tall. I eat lots of carbs, including pasta, bread, rice, potatoes, cookies, cake, pie, and three teaspoons of sugar in coffee at least twice a day. I weigh 77 kilograms [170 pounds]. I’m just one of those lucky folks whose genes let them chow down carbs without getting fat.”

There is no one diet to fit all. Each of us is different. What’s more, our circumstances change over time — from experience, I can tell you that getting type 1 diabetes will make you change your diet! Ultimately, the only way you’ll find out which type of diet is effective for you is by testing them and tracking your progress. Whether you use a smartphone calorie (or carb, or salt, etc.) counter like MyFitnessPal, or whether you use good old paper and pen, it doesn’t matter, although the technology in MyFitnessPal does make things easier. The main point though is to test for yourself what works.

But how often do you need to use a tool like MyFitnessPal? From my own usage, I can attest that although it only takes five to ten minutes a day in total, it does take a conscious effort to do every update. Also, some updates are difficult to make, for example, when you’re eating out and you don’t know exactly what’s in the foods you’re consuming.

Many people use MyFitnessPal intensely for a short period, then stop. I was one of those users. I began my low-carb diet in mid-March 2013 and started using MyFitnessPal at the same time. It helped me immensely in knowing how many carbs I was consuming every day, as well as avoiding eating foods that were high carb. After a few months of using MyFitnessPal regularly, I came to an understanding of what my average daily carb consumption was. At that point I stopped using the app. That’s because what I eat every day is fairly consistent: I have a salmon omelette most mornings for breakfast, a salad for lunch, a meat and green veggies dinner. Even when I deviate from my eating routines, I know which foods to avoid now and so I don’t feel I need to enter the data into MyFitnessPal.

Mike Lee admitted that this kind of usage is fairly common for his app. Some users, he said, “use the app for a while, maybe they’ll hit their goal weight, for example, and they’ll feel like they don’t need to track anymore. But then, oftentimes they’ll come back a few months later for a little clean-up.” MyFitnessPal sees a broad pattern of behavior, said Lee. “Some people calling it off, some people doing it every single day. It really depends on what the user is looking for.” Even Mike Lee himself doesn’t use MyFitnessPal for every single meal. “I log most of the time,” he told me. “There are some meals that I’ll skip. But in those cases, I still use the general knowledge that I’ve gained from the app.”

On that last point, I must correct Mike Lee. It’s not “general” knowledge he’s gained from tracking his foods on the app he created — it’s the knowledge of what is best for his own body.

Used with permission from TRACKERS: How Technology is helping us Monitor & Improve our Health by Richard MacManus. Bateman, RRP $29.99. © Richard MacManus. For buying options see ricm.ac