For most people it's not enough to just select great foods to eat to maintain a healthy weight. It's the combination of food and lifestyle choices that helps keep you healthy. Nutrition and Food Services has provided a great deal of nutritional information on packages, signs, and digital boards to inform you prior to make your food purchase. NFS also provides a summary of the nutritional values of the foods you just purchased on your receipt.

Nutrition and Food Services (NFS) is debuting the Smart Choice Smart U program to help encourage those smart choices on January 22, 2013. The Smart Choice food program has been used in the Moffitt Cafe, Moffitt Cafe Express, and 920 Express since 2009. NFS is partnering with 2 leading San Francisco-based companies, MyFitnessPal and Fitbit to create the Smart U program to encourage healthy lifestyle choices.

How does it work?

The Smart Choice Smart U program combines tracking of food with physical activity to help give you almost real-time feedback about how you're doing towards your personal wellness goals.

Tracking Daily Food Intake

1. The first step is to create a MyFitnessPal account at http://www.myfitnesspal.com.
2. The second step is to download the MyFitnessPal application to your smart phone from iTunes, Google Play, Blackberry App World, or the Windows Marketplace. Direct links to these sites are available at http://www.myfitnesspal.com/mobile. The application is free and is available on most major smart phone platforms. If you don't have a smart phone, you can use your account on the web site.
3. The third step is to use the built-in barcode scanner to log your food items or use the searchable database to manually enter them into your food diary.
4. If you just want to track you food intake, you can stop here.

Tracking Physical Activity

1. Obtain a Fitbit Zip, One, Flex, or Force trackers from the Fitbit online store. You can see a comparison of Fitbit trackers on their comparison site. Nutrition and Food Services will periodically be distributing some of the Zip trackers in the Moffitt Cafe after the Smart Choice, Smart U launch.
2. Create a free Fitbit account and link your tracker to the account. Your Fitbit activity is automatically updated via Bluetooth through a receiver on your computer or your BlueTooth 4.0 enabled smart phone.
3. Once you have the account created, you can link your Fitbit activity into your MyFitnessPal account. Physical activity is updated simultaneously in your Fitbit account as long as the accounts are linked.
4. Certain Fitbit trackers also can track sleep, blood pressure, and body weight.

Last updated: January 6, 2014