Data Import

Can I have data from MyFitnessPal show in my logbook?

In short, no. (Boooooo!)

We know, MyFitnessPal is a great app for tracking your meals, exercise, and weight. Whether you're a newbie and only track calories and carbs, or if you are hard-core and track macros, MyFitnessPal seems like a great solution for helping you get on track and stay motivated in your awesome efforts. 

 

We also know that it connects to Health for easier tracking of exercise and other things. So why do we not recognize data you've worked so hard to save into MyFitnessPal? It would seem like the perfect marriage, right?

 

Not so much. And it's really not the fault of MyFitnessPal, but rather that of how Apple Health handles this data. Synchronizing carb info between MyFitnessPal & mySugr Logbook via Apple Health is a bit messy right now. I'll do my best to describe why, but please let me know if you have questions along the way.

 

Apple HealthKit doesn't currently provide a good way of knowing when an existing value in HealthKit has been modified or deleted. So what happens is this:

 

  • You enter a carb value into MyFitnessPal. It's immediately pushed to Health.

  • From Health it's pushed into mySugr Logbook. Everything's fine.

  • Now you enter your additional food item into MyFitnessPal. Behind the scenes, MyFitnessPal does NOT push another (new) value to Health, but instead, it deletes the previously saved value and stores a NEW value, which is the sum of both food items. This new value shows up in Health (and the old value from step 1 is gone).

  • This new value is pushed into mySugr Logbook. However, since the deleted old value is not pushed to mySugr Logbook (in other words, Health does not tell Logbook that records have been deleted or updated), now BOTH values appear.

 

We're working on a few different approaches to get around this, but I don't have any details on when we'll have anything implemented.

 

We're also in touch with Apple, and hope they will help by building in a mechanism to inform apps (like ours) that read stuff from Health that records have been updated or deleted - that would help tremendously.

 

We'd also recommend sending some feedback along to MyFitnessPal suggesting that individual food records/values pushed to Health would be much more valuable than meal sums and day sums. We're reaching out to them from our end, too.

 

And, currently, we cannot pull that data from GoogleFit due to their restrictions (they only report things like steps, active time, distance, and calories, but no other nutritional stuff).

 

This is an awful lot of techy stuff to digest (no pun intended). We're sorry for all the detail, it's probably much more than what you wanted.

 

Please write us at support@mysugr.com if you have any further questions! We'll be happy to chat!

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