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Health & Fitness
MyFitnessPal
Updated Sep 29, 2026
MyFitnessPal is the food and exercise diary, and it is one of the few exports here that includes free-text notes. That is where a lot of people wrote the things they would rather not see resurface anywhere: trigger foods, what they substituted, why. The CSV export is Premium only. On a free account your route is a formal privacy request, and you pick the date range yourself with nothing pre-filled.
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What you'll get
Meal Level Nutrition Details (CSV)Progress History (CSV)Exercise History (CSV)Food and Exercise NotesPrivacy Request (All Accounts)
Before you start
- Check whether you are on Premium. MyFitnessPal's help centre is explicit that data export is a Premium and Premium+ feature. On the free tier you can print a report or share your diary with a trainer or doctor, which is not the same thing at all.
- Free accounts go through the Privacy Request Center instead. You pick your country and the right you want to exercise, and it is handled as a request. Appeals go to privacy@myfitnesspal.com.
- On Premium the path is the same everywhere: the More menu, then Nutrition or Progress, then the Export button. On the website it is Reports, then Export.
- The files come to the email address on your account. Check it is the one you are reading this from, and change it under Email Settings if not.
How to download
- Choose your date range. There is no "everything" option and no default, and you get all three files or none, since individual data types cannot be selected.
- Confirm the email address on the export screen. MyFitnessPal sends to whatever is on the account at that moment.
- Export, then wait for the email. They do not publish how long this takes, so check spam if nothing has arrived after a day or two.
- Unzip it on a computer rather than a phone. You get three CSVs named Your Nutrition, Your Progress and Your Exercise.
Pro tip
Two things to sort out before you start. The file export is a Premium feature, so on a free account your route is the Privacy Request Center, which is handled as a request by a team rather than downloaded as files. And you have to choose the date range yourself, with no "everything" option and nothing pre-selected. If you cannot remember roughly when you started logging, that is the part to work out first.
Recommended backup tools
- ProtonDrive — End-to-end encrypted cloud vault, and the right home for food notes like these
- pCloud — Lifetime storage option for one-off export archives
- Amazon SSD — Local encrypted backup paired with Cryptomator
After the download
- Three files, and you cannot choose. Every export contains all three: meal-level nutrition detail, progress history and exercise history. If all you wanted was your weight numbers, you still get the lot.
- The nutrition file is the valuable one and it is properly detailed. Calories, macros, micronutrients and timestamps, broken down by meal, with your food notes attached.
- Progress history is more than weight. Neck, waist and hip measurements are in there too, which is worth knowing given what it says about you.
- Notes come with it, both the food notes and the exercise notes. Several third-party migration guides claim you will lose them, which is why it is worth doing the export rather than writing MyFitnessPal off.
- Open the CSVs in a spreadsheet, not a text editor. They are comma-separated and unreadable raw, and Google Sheets or Numbers will take them without complaint.
- MyFitnessPal does not publish a list of what the export leaves out, so if one particular thing matters to you, check that it is in there rather than assuming.
- The Premium export and the Privacy Request Center are different processes. If you need a genuinely complete copy of everything they hold rather than three CSVs of your own logs, the request centre is the route to use.
- Anything from a connected service, Apple Health or a wearable, is not part of this. It is your MyFitnessPal diary, not the data of whatever you sync into it.
- Store the archive in ProtonDrive or pCloud for an off-site backup