Business Traveler Toolkit – My Fitness Pal

Being on the road full-time is tough. For starters there are all of the typical things people list as challenges living the road warrior lifestyle: you’re away from your family, friends, and all of the comforts that come with being able to come home every night if for no other reason than to sleep in your own bed. One of the lesser known struggles of living the up in the air lifestyle is managing personal health.

Traveling for business means a lot of meals in restaurants. Whether they be sit-down, fast casual, or just plain fast food, the risk is still the same – WE EAT TOO MUCH AND DON’T EXERCISE ENOUGH. Consulting, in particular, is notorious for this. The business model revolves completely around networking, which translates to a fair share of drinks and a copious amounts of food. To make matters worse, after a hard night of networking, hitting the gym isn’t always top priority. Days all blend together so it’s easy to lose track of things, but I’ve found a way to help keep us honest: MyFitnessPal.

Handy Dandy Notebook

MyFitnessPal at its core is a food journal for keeping track of all of the things we eat, but it has a few key features that you don’t get from jotting your eating habits down in your traditional/old school (or antiquated depending on how you look at it) handy dandy notebook*.

A Few Reasons Why My Fitness Pal is Better than Your Notebook

1. Robust catalog of foods that you can search to create your journal entries for each meal and automatically populate all of the related nutritional info
2. Equally robust library of exercises and approximate calories burned so that you can understand what your net calorie intake is for the day
3. In your face reminder of how much you would weigh in 5 weeks if every day were like today

The Bottom line