This week, we take a hands on look at MyFitnessPal, one of the top fitness apps in both the iOS and Android app stores -- and for good reason.

Calorie Counting Without the Aggravation 

One of the reasons why people don't stick with a weight loss plan, or even start one, is because most of the best systems require you to track your diet. So to see success, you have to make a daily habit of the most annoying life skills to learn: calorie counting.

MyFitnessPal is more than a calorie counting app. In fact, it's part-social media, part-fitness tracking hub, and part-diet keeper. But it's hard to convey how good it is at making calorie counting a breeze -- or at least easy enough that you can do it reliably every day.

Getting Started

You start out by creating a profile on the app, filling expected stats like height, weight, age and usual daily activity level, and that process also creates a user name for its in-house social network of fitness trackers and fellow weight losers.

Based on the information you give it, the app will figure out how many calories you burn on a regular day, and will ask you how much you want to lose, gain, or if you want to maintain your weight, along with how fast you want to reach that goal. That sets your recommended daily calorie intake.

Logging Meals

The central feature of MyFitnessPal is the daily food diary, at the top of which sits your daily recommended calories, with columns for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks underneath by default.

Add in the food you eat either by scanning the barcode on a package of food or searching for it.

Search is really where the app shines. It's hard to convey how convenient and smart the search function on MyFitnessPal is, but it's the central reason why it's one of the top fitness and weight loss apps.

Simply put, MyFitnessPal is to the food database as Google is to the web. You can find practically anything with a quick plain-English search, with a long list of variations on the food item to choose from: brand names, restaurants, common sides and additions, quantities, and different styles of preparations.

Rather than being overwhelming, it makes the process of finding the most accurate nutrition information incredibly fast and easy. And for meals you eat habitually, MyFitnessPro will remember your inputs, making logging those foods literally a two-click operation.

Behind the wide selection of meals and foods available, of course, is detailed nutrition information, which the app puts into easy-to-understand bar and pie graphs its "nutrition" summary section.

Navigation is also key here, as you have the option to see a statistical, granular breakdown of what you ate by day or week. Swiping through from personalized nutrition information graph after graph gives you a good sense of your progress and trouble zones at a glance.

Connectivity: Social and Technological

The other two major features of MyFitnessPal are its social network and the fact that it supports dozens of first and third-party apps, fitness tracking wearables, connected scales, smart exercise equipment, and more. For example, I had been using RunDouble's Couch to 5K app along with MyFitnessPal for days before I realized the two could connect and automatically log calories from exercise in the food diary.

The social media component is intended to bring community support into your personal fitness goal management, which experts say is an important component to maintaining your program. There are also options to create and share recipes, read and share articles with tips from the app's blog section, and message friends.

You can use your Facebook account with the app or just use the in-house network MyFitnessPal created to do the same, if you're a social kind of fitness tracker. Privacy options make it easy to stay under the radar if not.

Tap That App: The Best Way to Track Your Diet

Until there's some kind of stomach-embeddable sensor technology that automatically recognizes what you're eating and logs it into a diet tracking app (which sounds easy but weird, but will probably happen someday), MyFitnessPal is technology's best solution to the vexing problem of tracking what you eat.

All the other features -- and there are a lot of them -- make it a one-stop app for your fitness needs as well, but it's the fact that it only takes a couple seconds to log your food every day that really sets MyFitnessPal apart.

You can get the app for free (premium features require a monthly or yearly subscription) for Android and iOS.