Hopefully I can keep working on it and improving over time. I know this isn’t healthy or edifying, but it is what it is. I don’t know about you, but I am the sort of person who tends to throw in the towel the moment they hit an obstacle. I did not do all of the things I set out to do this past week. I already have friends who use and love it, so I figure I might as well give it a try. I’m thinking LoseIt! is the app I’ll be using. And I understand that folks deserve to get paid for the work they do. I understand why they made this decision. Am I likely to use the app without this capability? No. Is it possible to log my meals without the scanner? Yes. MFP has a robust database of many foods, including ingredients as well as the information for numerous restaurants. And frankly, I cannot afford $20 a month (actually, a lot more reasonable than I was anticipating, but still not in my budget right now) or $80 a year for a membership. If something is too difficult to do (especially if I know of a way to do it more efficiently), I am not apt to do the more difficult process. I don’t know if you’ve caught on by now, but I tend to be pretty lazy. It was so quick and easy to just open the camera on my phone, point it at the package, and instantly log the nutritional information for the right amount of servings I had eaten. But up until now the barcode scanner had always been free to use. And to their credit, I have heard nothing but positives about the features MFP offers in exchange for a membership fee. My Fitness Pal is free to use, but like most apps they have a paid version that comes with a bit more bells and whistles.

They put the blasted scanner behind their paywall! The second I hit publish on my Monday update last week, I signed into My Fitness Pal to catch up on logging the meals I had eaten, and the first thing I was loathe to discover was the fact that I no longer had access to the barcode scanner.

My fitness pal log in