Liberty University has announced that it’s continuing its commitment to helping students make healthy dining choices with a new free wellness app. Based in Virginia in the United States, the private, Christian university’s dining services provider, Sodexo, recently teamed up with MyFitnessPal, an app which will allow students to count calories and monitoring diet and exercise.
Simply by using their smartphones, Liberty students will be able to scan nutritional information barcodes, which will allow them to track their on-campus meals. According to Julia Pfeifer, Sodexo marketing manager, ‘We are really trying to implement programmes that are going to be beneficial to the student. We try to do everything we can to teach them healthier habits. Ultimately the choice is up to them … this is just another way to help them be conscious about what they are putting in their bodies and understand the results from it.’
The MyFitnessPal app is available on Apple, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows devices, and has over 2.5 million food items in an ever-expanding database. This includes almost 50,000 food brands and restaurants. Another benefit of the app is that you can customise your profile to remember your favourite meals, specific dietary requirements and personal weight loss goals, and there are also discussion forums that can provide you will support and motivation. Sodexo has uploaded its own recipes into the database, which students can add to their profiles with a swipe of a barcode.
Pfeifer explained that the advantage of using MyFitnessPal is that it takes a lot of the “guesswork” out of counting points or calories. ‘We know that the programmes we run on campus really have to create a better experience for the students and if it is something that is cumbersome or difficult to navigate or it is an app that is very hard to understand … it is probably not going to be efficient and they are not going to do it,” she said.
Liberty is committed to encouraging holistic wellness — producing champions of body, mind, and spirit because of its unique Christian mission. Another thing the University has in place is a small group that focuses on a holistic approach to diet and lifestyle, emphasising the importance of seeing the body as a temple. Pfeifer said that though the app is a bit more of a modern approach, ‘This is just another way we’re helping students realize the importance of treating their body well, eating well, and making good decisions.’
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