Get off your lazy arse!

Daily, I am amazed at some of the suggestions I see for My Fitness Pal. It's a free, online calorie tracking tool and I highly recomend it for anyone trying to lose or maintain their weight. Anyway...back to the story.

I'm all for automating things if you can so life can be easier, faster, etc; however, I have to laugh at some of the ideas that people come up with. Yes, it would be great if the system did everything for you but how do you expect to function as a normal human being if you can't make any decisions on your own? That's the point of the site, to give you the tools to learn how to eat better and make better choices. Not for the system to tell you what to eat and when.

Here are a couple suggestions I saw on their site today.
1. I think it would be awesome if you could convince places like restaurants, sub shops, pizza joints, and anyplace that people go to get food to incorporate a bar code on their receipts so we can scan the receipt and get all of our calorie info inputted. If that's to hard, maybe allow us to take a picture of a receipt, and use Optical Character Recognition to detect the Restaurant Name, and the items we bought.
     A. Based on the feedback I've seen from folks using the scanner portion of the app, it takes twice as long to scan a bar code and have it added to your food log than to just search the database manually. Seems like this is a good idea but getting close to the edge of complete laziness. Not to mention that there isn't a chance most restaurants are going to want to mess with that type of technology.

2. I would like an option that will suggest healthier food options if I log something that is bad for me.
     A. Seriously? I get the concept but the point of this program is to track calories...not to do all the work for you. As adults it is our responsibility to make choices for ourselves and suffer the consequences, if you will. Not to mention that I don't eat 100% healthy, can you imagine if the system prompted you to "eat something better" every time you logged a splurge (or normal) food? How would they decide what foods were considered "bad" for you? Not an idea I can support!

3. I want the system to suggest a meal to me based on the number of calories I have left for that day so I don't eat too much.
     A. This falls in the same category as #2. Maybe it's just because I don't like people (or computers) telling me what to do. I want to be free to eat whatever I want...that's how real life is going to be. You can't expect to eat nothing but grilled chicken and veggies to lose weight and then go back to eating normal food and be able to maintain. You can lose weight eating anything you want, it just has to be in moderation.