How to Export Your MyFitnessPal Data and Switch Apps

Title: How to Export Your MyFitnessPal Data and Switch Apps

You've decided to switch. The thing stopping you is three years of logged meals and the feeling that leaving means throwing them away.

Here's how to get all of it out, including the free route that works without Premium, and an honest account of what will and won't come with you.

There are two doors, and only one is free

The CSV export is Premium only. MyFitnessPal's built-in export, the one that emails you tidy files for nutrition, progress and exercise history, is available to Premium and Premium+ subscribers. Free accounts don't get it. If you're currently paying, this is the easy path and you should use it before you cancel.

The data request is free for everyone. Separately from the product feature, MyFitnessPal has to provide your full account data on request under privacy law. It's the same underlying information, just delivered differently. No subscription required.

Same data, different door. Most people don't know the second one exists and either pay for a month of Premium they didn't need or give up and leave their history behind.

If you have Premium: the CSV export

You can do this from the app or the website.

In the app, open the More menu, or your profile icon in the top right if there's no More menu. Choose Nutrition, then Export in the top right corner. Pick your date range and tap Export My Information.

Set the date range wide. Go back to your first ever log. There's no reason to be conservative here.

The files get emailed to whatever address is on your account, so check that it's an address you still use before you start. You'll get nutrition detail, progress history and exercise history. Every export includes all three.

Do this while your subscription is still active. Cancel afterward, not before.

If you're on the free tier: the data request

This one is web only. It isn't in the mobile app, so you need a computer.

Sign in at myfitnesspal.com, then go into your account settings and look for the privacy or data section. The option is usually labeled Download My Data or Request Data Export. MyFitnessPal has moved this around over the years, so if it isn't where you expect, search their support center for "request data export" and follow the current path.

Submit the request. It isn't instant. You'll get an email when the file is ready, usually within a day or two.

What arrives is a zip file containing a workbook rather than a plain CSV, and it comes password protected. The email tells you how to open it. Inside is your food diary with dates, meals, individual foods and macros, which is the substance of what you were worried about losing.

If you want a plain CSV out of it, open the workbook in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets and save the diary sheet as CSV. That's the whole conversion.

What actually transfers, and what doesn't

This is the part most migration guides skip, so here it is plainly.

No major calorie tracker imports a MyFitnessPal food diary directly. Not Cronometer, not MacroFactor, not Lose It, not us. The reason is boring and structural: every app has its own proprietary food database, and a line in your export that says "Chicken Breast, Grilled, 6 oz" doesn't map cleanly onto a specific entry in a different database. Matching it automatically produces wrong numbers, which is worse than not matching it at all.

So the export isn't a migration file. It's a record. Which sounds disappointing until you think about what you actually wanted it for.

What you keep: a permanent, readable archive of everything you ate and every weight you logged. You can open it any time, search it, hand it to a nutritionist or a doctor, chart it, or feed it to an AI assistant and ask it questions about your own patterns. That last one is genuinely useful and almost nobody does it.

What you lose: your recipes with their full ingredient breakdowns, your trend graphs as continuous lines, your recent-foods list built from logging the same thing two hundred times, and your friends list. The recents list is the one people actually miss. It rebuilds in about two weeks.

The practical way to switch

Export first, before you cancel or delete anything. If you delete the account, the data goes with it.

Run both apps in parallel for a week or two. Log in the new one, keep the old one open as a reference for portion sizes you've memorized. Your first week in a new app is always slower, and quitting during that week is why most people bounce back.

Rebuild your ten most common foods manually, on day one. Not all of them, just the ten you eat constantly. That's most of your logging volume and it gets you back to speed almost immediately.

If you are exploring MyFitnessPal alternatives in 2026 and moving to another paid app, overlap one billing cycle rather than cutting off cleanly. The cost of one extra month is trivial against the cost of migrating twice.

Don't delete your MyFitnessPal account at all, actually. Cancel the subscription and leave the account sitting there. It costs nothing and it's a backup.

The thing worth saying about all that history

People treat years of logs as an asset they can't abandon. Mostly they aren't.

The value of a food diary is almost entirely in the present tense. It works by making you conscious of what you're eating right now. The archive of what you ate in 2023 is interesting once and then never again, and the patterns inside it are ones you already know, because you lived them.

What the history doesn't contain is the reason you're switching. If you've logged consistently for three years and the thing you were trying to change hasn't changed, the problem was never insufficient data. It was that nothing turned the data into a decision.

So export it, keep it, and don't let it hold you anywhere. Six weeks of logging in an app that actually does something with the information will teach you more than the three years you're worried about losing.

Make Your Next Step Seamless with Stride

Ready to turn your daily tracking into real progress? Download the Stride app to log your meals, track your habits, and view clear nutrition estimates that keep you moving forward. It takes just a few taps to build a routine that fits your lifestyle.