What MyFitnessPal will and won't give you
MyFitnessPal has two ways to get your data out, and neither gives you everything. This is from their own help pages as of October 2026; menus move, so if a button isn't where we say, look for the same words nearby.
| Route | Who | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| File export App: Nutrition or Progress screen → Export. Web: Reports → Export. Pick a date range; a zip arrives by email in a few minutes. | Premium only | Three spreadsheets: nutrition totals per meal and day (calories, macros, some micronutrients), your progress history (weight and body measurements), and exercise. |
| Printable report Sign in on the website, open your diary, scroll to the bottom and click View Printable Report. Choose a date range. | Everyone | Your itemised diary: every food you logged, with amounts and macros, as a web page you can print, save as PDF, or copy. |
Two things never come out in a usable form, on any tier: your saved recipes and your saved meals and frequent foods. The nutrition export rolls your breakfast up into one row; it doesn't list the eggs. That's by design, and it's the part people find hardest to leave behind. The rest of this guide is about getting round it.
Step 1: your recipes, out of the trap
MyFitnessPal shows each saved recipe on screen even though it won't export it. That's enough.
- Open a recipe in MyFitnessPal so the ingredient list and servings are visible. Take a screenshot. For a long recipe, take two.
- In Your Way Kitchen, go to Recipes → New recipe → From image (web) or Import → Photo (phone) and choose the screenshot. Untick Adapt to my profile if you want it exactly as it was.
- The recipe comes back structured, with amounts, steps where MyFitnessPal had them, nutrition and a cost estimate. Check the amounts, then save.
Every account gets five free imports from a photo or a link, no trial needed, and the tabs say how many are left. Past five, importing from an image is part of Pro, and the 7-day trial covers it: twenty recipes is an hour's work. The free route with no limit is text: copy the recipe from MyFitnessPal's website, open New recipe → Paste text on the web, and it's structured without the AI.
Step 2: your go-to foods, as staples
Your frequent foods are the thing you'll miss on day one, and they're in the printable report.
- Run View Printable Report for the last 60 or 90 days and skim it. The same twenty foods will appear over and over; that's your list.
- In Your Way Kitchen, open Preferences → Staples and add the ones you always have in (eggs, oats, rice, the yogurt you buy). Staples are left off every shopping list and count as "in your pantry" when the app ranks recipes.
- Log the ones you eat as-is by searching: the database is the USDA's, with barcode lookup from Open Food Facts, so entries are consistent rather than crowd-sourced. After the first time, each one sits under Recent for one-tap logging.
Step 3: your weight history
If you have the Premium export, unzip the email and open Preferences → Bring in MyFitnessPal on the web. Choose the CSV files: the progress file becomes your weight history, and the nutrition file becomes one log row per meal (calories, macros, fibre, sodium, potassium) so the weekly review has a past from day one. It runs in your browser, sends nothing to the AI, and skips any dates already covered, so you can run it again later. On the free MyFitnessPal tier there's no file; add your starting weight and a few milestones under Weight on Today at their original dates instead.
Step 4: your targets, and one thing to leave behind
Put your calorie and macro targets into Preferences → Nutrition targets; they drive the bars on Today and how plans are sized. If you eat keto or low-carb, set the eating style too and Today shows net carbs. If you fast, set the window and plans are sized to it.
What you can leave behind is the habit of logging after the fact and finding out at 9 pm that the day didn't add up. Your Way Kitchen works the other way round: plan the week to your targets and your budget, cook it, and log a planned meal with one tap. The ledger is still there; it just stops being the whole app.
The first week after switching
Three questions set up your profile. Import your recipes with screenshots, add your staples, set your targets, then open the Planner and generate a week: it writes recipes to your diet and budget, builds the shopping list without your staples, and times each step while you cook. Free for everything except the AI; Pro, with a 7-day trial, for the planning, importing and photo logging.
Open Your Way Kitchen →Honest notes
- We read two of MyFitnessPal's export files: weight history and the per-meal nutrition totals. Recipes and individual foods will never be in those files, which is why the steps above go through screenshots and the printable report.
- Screenshot import reads what's on screen. If a MyFitnessPal recipe shows ingredients but no method, you'll get the ingredients and a sensible method written for them; mark it as yours and edit anything that isn't how you make it.
- Nutrition figures will differ a little between the two apps. MyFitnessPal's entries are largely user-submitted; ours come from USDA and the product's own label via Open Food Facts.