An Introduction

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with the makers of the website and app "My Fitness Pal" or any of the products or supermarkets mentioned in my posts.

Late in 2013 I decided that as I was fast approaching my forties it was time to get a grip and sort myself out, at this point I weighed in at 23 stone 4 pounds and my excessive weight had caused me numerous problems with my health including type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. I'd had my indulgent thirties and it was time for healthy 40s (unless I had already done too much damage!). 

With encouragement from my boss who placed a bet with me that I couldn't loose the weight I set the go date as January 1st 2014 and off I went....Then a universal app called My Fitness Pal came into my life and changed it forever and shortly made me obsessed calories and an avid reader of product boxes in supermarkets.

The premise of My Fitness Pal is that you set your personal information: sex, height, weight etc. and then your goals, whether they be loose weight, gain weight (!) or maintain weight, the website or app then gives you a target amount of calories for you to consume in a day, nutritional goals for carbohydrates, fat and protein and as you progress with your weight loss it reduces your daily calorie intake accordingly. You are then given a food diary which has a searchable database of foods, on the app it also has a barcode reader so that it is super easy to log your food and drink intake.

Once you get going you only have to rely on yourself for logging and be honest with yourself, if you cheat the app you are only cheating yourself really!

At the point of writing this introduction I have lost 7 stone in 142 days (I still have over a stone to go), so it seems to work for me. While thinking over the experience of using the app I thought to myself that other people may be interested in the foods that  I've discovered over my journey that have helped keep me on track and have basically resulted in a change of lifestyle rather than a diet: I'm eating three meals a day with snacks so I don't think of it as a diet!

As a side note the one thing I have noticed is that using the My Fitness Pal app is effectively a "supermarket diet" as it is so much easier to add food and drink from barcodes or the database, while you can enter your own recopies in the app it's more involved and doesn't really appeal to me.