MyFitnessPal versus Cronometer

Cronometer and MyFitnessPal are apps for tracking food consumption and exercise.  Both require you to honestly enter the foods you eat to be of any use.
At any rate, I've been using MyFitnessPal since around 2011.  As crazy as it seems, I've logged probably 70 to 80% of the meals I've had since I began using the app.  As a tool for general weight loss, MyFitnessPal has been an adequate and occasionally interesting tool since it brands itself as a sort of Facebook meets food diary app.  Unlike Facebook activities, eating habits aren't likely to be offered as readily for public consumption, and that's where MyFitnessPal probably goes wrong.  For example, of the half dozen or so people I've friended on MyFitnessPal, none regularly update their profiles... I'm sure there are plenty of people who participate more faithfully than the people I know... but still.
Cronometer isn't interested in the social aspect of weight loss.  Rather Cronometer is essentially a site that let's you track your nutrient and caloric intake to a fairly myopic level.  You can, if you like, monitor your intake of every single different amino acid.  That's pretty nice.

So let's go through this category by category:

Cronometer vs MyFitnessPal 

Social Component
Winner: MyFitnessPal

• You can track your friends' weight loss progress while posting your own.  
• Might be interesting to see more emphasis on self promoting good health, as opposed just weight loss.  

Appearance
Winner: MyFitnessPal

• It's really not close. 

Quality of Food Database 
Winner: Cronometer

• What Cronometer lacks in elegance and aesthetic is more than made up for in utility.  Granted the $2.99 app isn't terribly useful [at least, as compared to the free app from MyFitnessPal], but it is okay on the run.  Both websites, though, are free to use.
• What I'm concerned with when I'm logging the food I eat are things like poly and mono unsaturated fats [including omegas].  Even supposedly "verified" foods in the MyFitnessPal database often lack that basic level of information; in some cases the listed foods are egregiously incorrect.    As it is now, MyFitnessPal does not even provide fields for vitamins like B6 and B12, nor does it break down protein into its constituent amino acids. This may be a fairly flimsy complaint to make, given that most people really don't care to the degree that fitness fanatics do.
• I find that I have to add certain foods myself using Cronometer.  I'm referring to certain processed foods that haven't even made it into their database just yet. More general items, like a Jamaican meat patty cannot even be added through a general search using Cronometer.  This is not a problem with MyFitnessPal.
• The food database for MyFitnessPal is, it seems, user generated, which is both good and bad. It's good because it allows us to have a wikipedia type of food database... but it's bad because the amount of oversight is zero, and that error rate appears to be fairly significant.  This is something to consider if you have more than a passing interest in logging your meals in a diary. 

As you can see in the images below, Cronometer is pretty in depth.

Overall winner: Cronometer
MyFitnessPal would win hands down if it provided the sort of detail that Cronometer does.  Given that UnderArmour has purchased MyFitnessPal I'm expecting a great deal of improvement.  But for now Cronometer provides such a breadth of detail that I prefer it.

Smoke...

Lots of smoke thanks to some fires. #yxe #Saskatoon

A photo posted by John (@misterspalding) on Jun 29, 2015 at 10:06am PDT

Now that the air quality has improved here in Saskatoon it's actually not too difficult to get out for a nice run. For a time, residents in Saskatchewan were advised to stay inside... if you look at the photo above, you'll see why.
I was just at the library to pick up a copy of John L. Parker's Once a Runner and saw one heck of a line of folks from La Ronge queuing up to obtain library cards.

Today's run was 5.8 kilometres here in Forest Grove.  The goal for this month is to run at least 75k and ready myself for an August race.

I'll leave you with this:

Oh this is exciting. #xbox

A photo posted by John (@misterspalding) on Jul 6, 2015 at 11:46am PDT

Three Excellent Sources of Potassium for Runners

Runners have a terrific need for sodium, potassium, calcium in addition to glycogen.  To get potassium, we tend to look to bananas, but there are plenty of other sources of potassium.

Here are three that I really like:

1. Kale

A cup of chopped kale will give you 329 milligrams of potassium with negligible calorie expense, and a little protein bonus . Think smoothie.

2. Avocados [Post Run or Meal/Snack Time]

100 grams is roughly what an avocado weighs, but you can verify with your own food scale.  At 485 milligrams of potassium, you really would be hard pressed to beat the value here.  I tend to eat two of these at a time, along with some seasoning [yes, that means Old El Paso Guacamole mix] which brings the calorie count to 420, making it a significant caloric investment.  On the other hand, you gain over 900 milligrams, 4 grams of protein, 3.6 grams of polyunsaturated fat and 20 grams of monounsaturated fat.  

3. Dried Apricot

Okay, take another look at that...  1850 milligrams of potassium for every 100 grams consumed! What's even more interesting is that the only fat contained therein is poly and monounsaturated.  On the downside, this is pretty carb heavy stuff.  So I wouldn't necessarily recommend this on non running days.


Happy Canada Day!