Progress Bar FAQ

* Progress Bar feature is only available in the US

MyFitnessPal has designed the all new nutrition Progress Bar to offer a better way to monitor behavior. We want to help people, through motivation and recommendations, create food habits that support their desired outcomes.

The Progress Bar will help build users awareness of their behavior, encourage more consistent logging, and consume foods that will help them achieve their outcome goal.

Can I remove the Progress Bar from my Dashboard?

Which nutrients ARE included in the Nutrition Score?

Why isn’t cholesterol factored into the Nutrition Score?

Will my Progress Bar/Nutrition Score/Engagement Score ever go down?

What if I retro- or pro-actively log my foods?

Why is my Progress Bar score not going up anymore?

What happens if I go over my goal for a nutrient or go over my calories? 

I’m logging food, but my nutrient intake looks off/wrong. Why is that? 

Can I remove the Progress Bar from my Dashboard?

You can remove the Progress Bar by tapping Edit and then unchecking Show on dashboard. Be sure to tap Done Editing at the bottom to save your changes.

Which nutrients ARE included in the Nutrition Score?

Calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat, fiber, potassium, iron, calcium, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, saturated fat, sodium, and sugar (13 total).

Why isn’t cholesterol factored into the Nutrition Score? 

Because it is not of importance for gaining, losing, or maintaining weight and it is not necessarily bad for heart health. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans deprioritized it as a nutrient of concern in 2020.

Will my Progress Bar / Nutrition Score / Engagement Score ever go down?

Not unless you delete a food entry or decrease a quantity/serving size.

What if I retro- or pro-actively log my foods?

Scores are always calculated for the day you consume the foods. So if you log beforehand, those entries would apply to the day that you ate the foods rather than the day you logged them. This de-incentivizes users from gaming the system to increase their PB score by logging food for other dates.

Why is my Progress Bar score not going up anymore?

100% is the maximum your Progress Bar can fill. While we allow some individual components go over 100%, the individual Nutrition and Engagement Scores will never go over 100%, which means the Progress Bar will also never exceed 100%.

What happens if I go over my goal for a nutrient or go over my calories? 

In most cases, your score will stop counting at 100%. However, we deal with some nutrients in a different manner. For macros (protein, carbs, fat) and other nutrients for which we recommend limiting consumption (like sodium, sugar, and saturated fat), we measure your progress relative to your overall calorie consumption. If you are over-consuming these nutrients relative to your total calorie intake, your progress may halt and you may not achieve full credit for that nutrient in your Progress Bar.

I’m logging food, but my nutrient intake looks off/wrong. Why is that? 

The Progress Bar relies on having high-quality nutrition data from our food database. However, many foods in our database are missing nutritional contents for certain nutrients (such as Vitamin A or Iron).

If you log a food with missing nutritional information, the nutrient progress for those nutrients will not increase. Additionally, a food’s nutritional contents could be incorrect (sometimes wildly so, i.e. a food having 100000 calories and 16000g of potassium). If you log a food with incorrect nutritional information, it may skew your progress bar.

While we can’t feasibly fix all data quality issues in our foods database, you can ensure you are logging the highest quality foods by doing the following: 1) choosing “Verified” foods or “Best match” when searching, 2) checking the nutritional contents before you log for any red flags (and reporting them from the app!), and 3) using the barcode scanner if that is available to you.