I Used to Coach MyFitnessPal Users. Here's What the Redesign Actually Broke.

For eight years, almost every new client I took on showed up with a MyFitnessPal account.

They'd open the app on their phone, hand it to me, and ask the same question. Some version of "I've been doing this for two years and I'm not getting anywhere. What am I missing?"

I want to talk about that question, because the MyFitnessPal redesign that everyone is angry about right now has put it back on the table for a few hundred thousand people at once. The taps are not the real problem. The taps are what made the real problem visible.

The redesign, and what people are actually saying

In April 2026, MyFitnessPal shipped a major redesign. The food diary got reorganized. The home dashboard got reorganized. The flow for logging a single meal went from two or three taps to six, sometimes ten. Power-user shortcuts like copy-meal-from-yesterday and multi-select got buried or removed. Calorie totals per meal got smaller. Promotional cards for Premium and the new AI Meal Scan got larger.

The official MyFitnessPal response, on Reddit and in their support forums, is that the change is "here to stay." They cited "business and technical reasons."

If you've been logging on MyFitnessPal for years and you opened the app one morning and felt like someone moved your furniture in the dark, you're not crazy and you're not exaggerating. A team at Sunbeam coded 1,981 App Store reviews from the post-redesign window. The single largest specific request, from 99 different users, was the same. "Give me a way to switch back."

The verbatim quotes from those reviews tell the story better than I can.

"It takes me so many more clicks to do the same thing I used to do in seconds."

"The food diary has been ruined. The diary view is completely screwed up."

"Where are my calories per meal? How many calories are left?"

"I'd do anything to go back to the previous version."

You can find a hundred more in any post-redesign App Store dump. They all say versions of the same thing. The app I used to trust no longer does the one thing I came here for.

I want to take you seriously on this. The complaint is real. The redesign is bad. But if you're sitting here today, frustrated, looking for the next app to switch to, I'd like to point at something the redesign accidentally surfaced. The taps you're angry about are not why MyFitnessPal stopped working for you.

The deeper pattern

Here is the thing I learned about MyFitnessPal in eight years of coaching people who used it. It is brilliant for the first six months. It is decent for the next twelve. After that, it becomes a place where you log calories out of habit while quietly losing faith that it is helping you anymore.

This is not a bug. This is the design.

MyFitnessPal is built for the median user. The median user is someone in their first year of paying attention to their food. They don't know what 30 grams of protein looks like. They're learning to read labels. They're shocked by how many calories are in a smoothie. For that person, an app that lets them log a meal and see a daily total is genuinely useful. It teaches them the shape of their own eating. That teaching is real.

But teaching has a ceiling. Once you've learned that an avocado has 240 calories, an avocado will continue to have 240 calories tomorrow. Once you've learned your maintenance is around 2,400 a day, you don't need to be retaught that next week. You learn the lesson, and then the tool that taught you starts running in place.

This is the moment, in my experience, that people start to feel restless about their app. They keep logging because they're afraid of what happens if they stop. They keep tracking because their habit runs on it. But the app stopped giving them anything new about a year ago. They're just maintaining the relationship.

The redesign turned that quiet feeling into a loud one. Now the tool that stopped giving you anything new is also harder to use. So you opened Reddit and discovered you weren't the only one feeling this way. Now you're searching for an alternative.

The mistake most people make at this point is to look for a better tracker. PlateLens, Cronometer, Lose It!, Nutracheck, YAZIO. Each of these has good reasons to exist. If your only problem is that the new MyFitnessPal takes too many taps, one of them will solve it. PlateLens in particular has a clean photo-first flow that gets you back to two-second logging.

But if you've been on MyFitnessPal for more than eighteen months and you're plateaued or backsliding, switching to a different tracker won't fix what's actually broken. You'll feel better for two weeks because the new app is cleaner. Then you'll plateau in the new app. Because it isn't a tracker that you've outgrown. It's the tracking.

Who this article is for

Let me be specific about who I'm talking to, because the rest of this piece isn't for everyone.

This is for you if you've used MyFitnessPal for at least a year. You know your maintenance calories within fifty. You know your macro targets. You know what your trigger foods are. You can guess the calorie count of a meal you've never seen with reasonable accuracy. You're not a beginner. You graduated from the beginner class a long time ago.

You're also probably stuck somewhere. Maybe the scale hasn't moved in six months. Maybe your lifts plateaued. Maybe you lost the first twenty pounds and put back five and can't figure out why. Maybe you're just bored, and you can feel yourself doing the daily logging ritual without believing it's pointed at anything anymore.

If that's you, the redesign isn't your real problem. Your real problem is that the tool you're using is a teacher, and you've already learned the lesson.

What you actually need next

The next step after a teacher isn't a better teacher. It's a coach.

I'll define what I mean by that. A teacher gives you a curriculum that's true for everyone. A coach gives you a program that's true for you, and changes it next week based on what happened this week. A teacher tells you what 30 grams of protein looks like. A coach tells you that you specifically respond better when your protein comes from a different source on Wednesday than on Monday, because they watched your data for six weeks and that's what they saw.

That's the gap MyFitnessPal cannot close. Not because they're bad at software. Because the unit economics of a $19.99-per-month app serving millions of users cannot include a person who actually looks at your data and adapts what you do next.

A coach used to mean a person. For most of human history, if you wanted real coaching, you found a person, you paid them several hundred dollars a month, and you showed up in their gym twice a week. That's still a great deal if you can afford it. I ran a gym like that for ten years. The clients who stayed got results that no app could match.

But that model has a ceiling too. The number of people on Earth who can pay $300 a month for in-person coaching is small. The number of people who could benefit from coaching is enormous. There's a gap.

That gap is what I built Training Space to fill.

What a coaching OS actually looks like

Training Space isn't a calorie tracker. If what you need is a better tracker, go install PlateLens. I'm being direct about this because I'd rather you find what you actually need than have you sign up for the wrong thing.

What Training Space is, instead, is a personalized operating system that I build for you, by hand, in the first week. I look at your training history, your goals, your past programs, what's worked, what hasn't. I write you a program. I set up your tracking inside the system so it captures the data I need to keep adapting it. Every workout you do makes the OS smarter about you. Every week I revise the program based on what the data says. You're not running a generic plan that gets bored of you in month four. You're running a plan that gets sharper.

Picture the difference. MyFitnessPal asks you to log your food and shows you a daily total. The OS I build you logs your food, your training, your sleep, your mood, and tells you that the reason your squat felt off on Tuesday is probably the sleep debt from the weekend, that your protein has been low on training days for three weeks running, and that your program is going to swap the Thursday session for an active-recovery day this week because you're showing fatigue markers. It tells you all of that in the morning when you open the app, the way a real coach would have told you if you'd gone in for a session.

That's the thing you can't get from a tracker. That's the thing that stops the plateau.

The honest price comparison

I want to be honest about cost because it's the question people ask me at this point.

MyFitnessPal Premium is $19.99 a month, or about $80 a year if you pay annually. Most of the alternatives I mentioned earlier sit in the same range. Cheap, generic, made for everyone.

Training Space is more expensive. The build is $249, $499, or $999 depending on what tier of complexity your situation calls for. The ongoing subscription is $99 a month. The math is roughly five times what MyFitnessPal Premium costs.

I'm not going to dress that up. It's not a price-match. It's a different category. You're paying for the build (which is a person, me, writing your program by hand) and the ongoing adaptive coaching that happens inside the OS every week.

For most people, this is too expensive. If you log calories occasionally and you mostly feel fine, you don't need this. You need a free tracker and a couple of decent meals. Go in peace.

The people who buy Training Space are people who are paying $19.99-$40 a month for an app already, have been for a few years, have plateaued, and are starting to think about whether the next move is to hire a real coach. The $99 a month sits in the middle of those two. It's more than an app, less than a person, and the people who need it know who they are.

What to do this week if you've outgrown MyFitnessPal

Here's what I'd suggest, if you've read this far and recognize yourself in the cohort I'm describing.

Try the workaround first. The Turkey location trick reverts the MyFitnessPal interface to the old design for many users. It's not a fix, but if your only problem is the taps, it might get you back to logging in two seconds and you can stop reading this article. Worth ten minutes of your time before you do anything else.

If the workaround doesn't fix it for you, and you realize that the redesign is the surface and the deeper thing is that the tool stopped giving you anything new, take the quiz. It's seven questions. It takes about three minutes. I'll write you a snapshot of what your Training Space would look like, by hand, within a day. Free. No sales call, no urgency, no countdown timer.

If, after reading the snapshot, you decide that's not the move for you, you'll still have a clearer picture of your own situation than you had before. The snapshot is built to be useful even to people who don't end up buying. That's intentional. I'd rather a hundred people read their snapshot and decide they're fine, than have twenty people buy something that wasn't a fit.

If, on the other hand, the snapshot lands and you realize this is the missing layer between the tracker you've outgrown and the in-person coach you can't afford, the next step is the build. We do that together. It takes a week. Then your OS starts running.

One last thing

I want to thank MyFitnessPal, sincerely, for what they did during the first eight years of their existence. They taught a generation of people what calories are. They built the largest food database in the world. They normalized the idea that a person can take their own health seriously without hiring a professional. None of that is small. The fact that they've drifted toward a redesign optimized for monetization rather than for the user who's used the app for a decade doesn't erase what they built before.

But the loyal user who's frustrated right now isn't being dramatic. The pattern they're feeling is real, and the redesign just made it visible. The tool that taught you isn't built to be the tool that keeps you growing. That was always going to be a different tool. The redesign just brought the moment forward.

If you've outgrown the generic tier, the next step isn't a better tracker. It's a coach. Whether that coach is me, or someone in your local gym, or the person who pops up if you Google "online personal trainer" tomorrow, the category-jump is what fixes the plateau. Not another logger.

The quiz is here. If you want to talk it through with me directly first, you can reply to any of my emails and it lands in my inbox.

I hope this helps you find the right next step, whatever it is.

— Michael