FITNESS
MYFITNESSPAL
N
ow on the smartphones of people everywhere looking to manage their weight and
fitness, MyFitnessPal has gone from a homegrown calorie-tracking website to help a
couple prepare for a beach wedding, to a $475-million company with over 90 million registered app users. We asked Mike Lee, the co-founder and CEO, about the power of this
fitness app.
Parvati Magazine: How effective is MyFitnessPal as a tool for weight management?
Mike Lee: Keeping a food diary can double a person’s weight loss according to a 2008
study from Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research. A healthy lifestyle is generally achieved with 75 percent diet and 25 percent exercise. With 90 million users and 5
million foods in its database MyFitnessPal users can accurately and efficiently track their
caloric intake and keep track of their physical activity. Our blog (which can be accessed
through the app or the web) is filled with healthy recipes, exercise ideas and fitness tips
and helps you to learn how to live and maintain a healthy lifestyle. We also have a very
active, encouraging community that helps you feel accountable, like you have millions of
friends on this journey with you.
PMAG: When did you get the idea to create MyFitnessPal?
ML: The idea for the app actually stemmed from a personal need. My wife and I were
FITNESS
preparing for our beach
wedding and we both
wanted to lose a little
weight. We went to see
a fitness trainer and he
gave us a book listing
the nutritional values of
around 3,000 foods and a
small pad of paper to use
for tracking our calories.
I’ve been programming
since I was 10 years old,
so I just knew there had
to be a better way to
keep track of my meals
and snacks, but I couldn’t
find anything online that
was good enough. Every digital product on
the market at that time
was just as painful and
time-consuming to use as
food-logging in that notebook. So, I built my own
solution, and it eventually
became MyFitnessPal.
Since, we’ve helped
more than 90 million
people achieve and
maintain a healthier
and happier lifestyle.
We have a database of
over 5 million foods and
hundreds of exercises,
top fitness technology
partners and community
insights. We’ve become
the leading resource for
achieving and maintaining health goals.
PMAG: What has been
some of the most crucial
feedback you’ve gotten
from users?
ML: Our user success stories speak for themselves.
Through our data collection, we have created
a virtuous cycle: users
add to and improve our
health data and expand
our food database, we
use that data to improve
the product to drive
more user success, and
more success leads to
more users, which leads
to even more data.
Additionally, we hear
from users daily and listen
to their needs and evaluate the features they
want to see. While we
couldn’t possibly provide
every feature on our own,
we’re always partnering
with other health and
fitness apps and gadgets to integrate useful
features with MyFitnessPal. In fact, we currently
integrate with 80% of the
wearable fitness devices
on the market, with 4 of
the top 5 GPS activitytracking apps and with
the top 2 wireless scales—
these integrations enable our users to get the
round-the-clock view into
their health data that
makes the data usable in
their quests to meet their
personal health goals.
PMAG: How can tools like
MyFitnessPal help people
to keep a light and positive attitude towards their
fitness journey?
ML: MyFitnessPal gives
you a virtual cheering
squad through its active,
well managed community of more than 90M people, providing support
when you need it—not
just once a week. That’s
greater than the population of California! You
decide how you want
to use MyFitnessPal —
through an app, on your
desktop, to lose weight or
to reduce your risk of diabetes — and we’ll make
it work for you.
Mike Lee is Senior Vice President of Under Armour Connected Fitness,
responsible for MyFitnessPal and MapMyFitness, the leading health and
fitness technology platforms. Mike is the Co-Founder of MyFitnessPal, a
wholly owned subsidiary of Under Armour, Inc., which was acquired in
March of 2015 for $475M. Prior to founding MyFitnessPal, Mike co-founded
NextC, a venture-funded startup focused on building online communities.
During his 20 year tenure in the technology industry, Mike has held
leadership positions at several other top start-ups in Silicon Valley, including
Palm, Handspring, Beyond.com, and Regis McKenna. Mike graduated
summa cum laud e from Princeton with a B.A. in economics.