As expected for the holidays, Garmin has announced a cut to food and nutrition on Garmin Connect. Or rather, specifically, their paid platform, Connect+.
The feature mainly replaces the long-standing functionality provided by MyFitnessPal, which allows logging of food on the MFP platform (including food scanning and food barcode database), which will then be synced to Garmin Connect. In this case, all of this is done within the Garmin Connect app, as well as the Nutrition widgets on other watches.
To be clear, the existing MyFitnessPal integration continues to work. They offer a basic free option, but to get food scanning, you’ll need their premium tier, which runs $80/year (unless you were grandfathered in with the free plan last decade). So, basically, you get that feature for Garmin’s $69/year fee, plus Garmin throws in a free gold star for your profile picture. So, there’s that for you.
With that, let’s dive right into things with a quick look at food chops, and how they tie in with your calorie burn data from Garmin devices (which is kind of the whole point here).
Initial Setup:
First, I’m going to assume that you already have Garmin Connect+ enabled on your account. To be clear, this is a Connect+ feature, so you should enable that. If not, it will offer to help you register.
Once that’s set up, in the app you’ll go to More > Health Statistics > Healthy Eating. Alternatively, you can add the widget to your Garmin Connect home screen under the ‘At a Glance’ section.
Once you turn this on, if you have MyFitnessPal activated, it will break that integration completely. This is notable because it also works with any sharing of workout data with MyFitnessPal. It’s not clear to me if I can recreate that with only workout data or not, maybe I’ll try later. Also notable is that MyFitnessPal is the old backend method for syncing other weight scales to Garmin Connect. So this kills that too.
In any case, from there, it will ask you a few questions about your goals here, and to confirm your statistics. If you have a Garmin Index scale, it will automatically calculate your weight for you. Obviously, I enjoyed ‘resting’ on holidays. But, back to it already. You can change all these details, I just left it mostly as it is, although I increased the weight loss per week to 0.5kg (1.10lbs), given how active I am, it will be very easy.
It will then summarize all this information and ensure that the system is set:
From there, it’s time to start chopping things.
Daily entry:
At this point, it will be pulling your data from your Garmin devices, while at the same time waiting for you to fill in food/nutrition data into the app.
You can do this from one of two places:
1) Your watch (a small set of features, but it’s there)
2) The Garmin Connect smartphone app, within the Food feature
If you go to your smartphone, you can access that Nutrition feature in a few different places, including both the main page if you add a lookup, or down in the Health menu.
Once open, you’ll see your live Calories and Macros at the top (and notice the 1/7 day/week/4 week/1 year options), and below that a daily timeline divided into Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and hours of the day as well.
Note that you can adjust these windows in the settings (upper right corner) if you like.
Another notable feature is that you can change the country you are shooting food in. This *SAFETY* is important when traveling outside of your country as described in Garmin Connect. Note that this won’t change all your other Garmin Connect settings, but unless you change them, nothing will scan. Trust me, I tried. In my case, my Garmin account is set up in the United States, but I live in Spain. At first, not a single food item was found when the barcodes were scanned. However, when I changed it, all the food I could scan in my fridge and cupboards, except for the bowl of eggs, was found (thankfully, the easiest thing to do math on). I would argue that Garmin would have some logic that knows based on the phone’s current location that it should ask/suggest switching to a different country…
In any case, let’s look at scanning/adding food. Next to each meal (breakfast/lunch/afternoon), there is an option to add a meal. Tapping that takes you to a menu with:
– All recently logged in feeds (quick access)
– Favorite food
– My food (things you made yourself based on knowing the exact values)
– My Food
– Scan food (top right corner)
You can see these here, with one of them open:
The main ones are pretty self-explanatory, noting that you can adjust the feed rates. Well, let’s scan something instead. When you do that, you have two options: Scan the food, or scan the barcode. I started by scanning the barcode, went through my kitchen and scanned almost everything I could find. Almost everything is scanned without issue, and in less than 1 second. Very quickly. Note below you can choose the serving size, by weight or portion, depending on the product. It then shows us the full details of that section below.
The only thing that didn’t work was this packet of eggs. If so, it just says the nuggets are solid. However, you can add that manually if you want. Some products are easy enough with a food label on the outside, while others may require more work.
Another way to add products is by taking a picture of them. In this case, you can just point the camera at something and take a picture. It will try to find the weight of the product and find the same. Below, I had bread from a bakery in the US that DesFit bought last month (it was frozen). This is not in the database, but you have a good guess as to what it was:
I don’t know if those calories/macros are correct, but they probably are. I looked at the weight of the piece I cut, which was a little high, but good enough. I thought it was funny that it also grabbed the pineapple in the back. But that was an easy choice to leave.
So what about the whole plate? Here’s my dinner last night – where we got everything right. However, one would probably need to slightly alter some of the portion sizes, i.e. the vegetables (I ended up eating more than was on my plate to begin with, so just leave the portion sizes mostly as they are).
Of course, the challenge with all of these food viewing platforms isn’t that you find that you have chicken or lasagna, but that they don’t know how to prepare it. For example, how much butter is in a dish will *dramatically* change the end result in terms of calories/fat, but otherwise it won’t show up in the picture.
Oh, and as a kidding aside, later in the day I went to our little grocery store, and I just randomly took a picture of the entire shelf. Surprisingly, it found almost everything:
The only mixed thing is the package of brown stuff that can’t be seen on top, which is ginger (not mushrooms), but it will be very hard to tell with this range of the shot and most of the package/shelf is blocking it. Crazy impressive (even if this has no practical use).
With that whole set, I added my breakfast items, a post-14mi/22km recovery drink, and a lunch I haven’t had yet. All this now comes from above. Finally, I’ll add a few gel packs from my run in there as well.
Also, by default, it won’t count the workout/workout you’ve completed in calories, however, if you look in the settings, there is an option for that. Here are before/after screenshots of how that accounts for my performance.
Now, there’s also an option to log items within the Food app on your Garmin watch. I’m using the latest public beta of the Garmin Fenix 8, and when I see this screen, it crashes as soon as I touch it. Although I tried one last time during my video up, in the end it didn’t crash. In short, it allows you to see a duplicate of the above data, and allows you to enter the food you have already defined.
Finally, beyond the daily beats, you can also see summary data for the date ranges at the top. Obviously, I haven’t been in yet, and Garmin didn’t include any screenshots of that in their announcement, so here are some bare bones to show you the general features:
With that, let’s wrap things up.
Finish:
Additionally, Garmin says Garmin Connect Active Intelligence tidbits will appear at the top of the Garmin Connect app, related to your nutrition slices. Obviously, I’m going to push this to the extreme with a big ice cream, to see how it reacts. So far, it hasn’t said anything about my food intake, and it just focused on my long period from today (which is fair enough).
Now admittedly, while I was hooked on the MyFitnessPal feature a long time ago (like, ten years ago), I don’t log meals myself. So I can’t really do a side-by-side comparison of how these two companies compete in this space. For example, MyFitnessPal includes meal planning features.
But, in terms of the essentials I would want (quickly adding food/favorites, barcodes working, quick check-in), this seems to check all the boxes. Obviously, from a pricing perspective, it’s not free, but at least it’s competitive with MyFitnessPal. Also, I would argue that for the first time since the launch of Connect+, it at least adds a feature that makes it mandatory to sign up for Connect+ if you’ve already signed up for MyFitnessPal.
With that, thanks for reading!
DID YOU FIND THIS POST HELPFUL? SUPPORT THE PLACE!
Hopefully, you found this post helpful. The website is truly a labor of love, so please consider becoming a DC RAINMAKER Supporter. This is for an ad-free experience, and access to (mostly) our bi-monthly “Shed Talkin'” behind-the-scenes video series.
Support DCRainMaker – Buy on Amazon
If not, maybe consider using the link below when shopping on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate, I earn on eligible purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, but your purchase helps support this website greatly. It could just be buying toilet paper, or that pizza oven we use and love.
