Sleep yourself fit! MyFitnessPal adds sleep tracking

Would you rather hit the treadmill for an hour or hit the mattress for eight? Sleep is an important and underrated part of a proper wellness plan, balanced with good nutrition and exercise.

It's been once week since the already excellent calorie counting app, MyFitnessPal, has added a sleep tracking component to help you progress along your fitness journey. Have you given it a try yet?

Sleep tracking (simply called Sleep in the app) gets its own area in MyFitnessPal. You'll find it under More within the app on your phone. In the new Sleep tab, your night is broken down into four parts: Awake, REM, Core, and Deep, highlighted in various degrees of soothing colors (and one scary red part to show you how much time you lost by being awake in the night).

Below your sleep data, you'll also see the foods you logged for the day. While it's helpful to see both the food and the sleep data stacked on top of each other, this is one area where the helpfulness of the sleep tracking becomes a little sus. You have to draw your own conclusions from the data.

"Did the wings and beer at 10:00 p.m. cause me to get less REM than the night before?"

"Did I eat so many Oreos for breakfast because I needed the sugar rush after only getting 5 hours of sleep?"

With a premium membership to MyFitnessPal, you can also see timestamps for each meal. This could possibly help you draw better conclusions from the data, but overall you'll still need some basic knowledge about metabolism, nutrition, and sleep to start implementing meaningful change.

The Sleep app gets its data from wearables like Apple Watch, Google Pixel Watch, Oura, Whoop and more by integrating with Apple Health or Health Connect. So you have to make sure you're sharing sleep data with either of those two for your sleep information to show up in MyFitnessPal.

The Sleep feature is available in the free tier of MyFitnessPal. Do you see yourself giving this a try? What are you currently using to track your sleep? Have you found anything that's worked particularly well for you? Let us know in the comments section!