My Fitness Pal is a website and app that helps you keep motivated to get fit and lose weight
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| The MFP website. I've burned more than 300 calories today. |
I haven’t made major changes. More fruit and salads and smaller portions, cutting down on the amount of oil used in cooking, cutting down a bit on carbs. Small changes that are easy to maintain. I don’t believe in denying myself, so instead of cutting out foods like cake and chocolate, I just have them in small pieces. I don’t diet, as such, as I don’t believe it works. This is about retraining my eating habits to be healthier – for good.
It does get rather dispiriting at times, though. Especially when you see someone tucking into a huge piece of cake and can’t help but think ‘Why can’t I just eat whatever I want and not put on any weight?’ Which is why you should never compare yourself to others. Heck, for all I know that person might run straight to loo and throw up everything they’ve just eaten. And that’s certainly not something I want to be doing.
Mr motivator
Staying motivated when these thoughts hit can be challenging. So after a bit of advice from friends I did what I usually do and turned to the internet. My Fitness Pal is a website and app. It’s easy to use and really quite simple – you input your weight, how much you want to lose, the time scale and various other personal data.
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| The app, showing my healthy breakfast of porridge and jam! |
It’s been an absolute revelation to me. Weight loss advice nearly always includes keeping a food diary, but I’ve never seen the point. I know what I eat during the day, so why would writing it down make a difference, I always thought. How wrong I was. The knowledge that everything you’ve eaten will be there in black and white (or rather pixels) for you and all your MFP friends to see really does make you think about what you’re putting in your mouth. It also turns out that I’m really quite competitive – not so much with other people, but with myself. I really want to ‘win’ at losing weight.
This hasn’t meant that I’ve particularly been denying myself, but I do think more about my caloric intake. I’ll maybe eat a smaller dinner if I want to have cake. I also do an awful lot of exercise to offset those calories.
It also works well with other software I use. I recently invested in a Fitbit to count steps on days off the bike (usually Wednesdays and Saturdays). Your Fitbit account can be linked to your MFP account, so the calories you’ve burned by walking are offset against what you’ve eaten. I’m also a huge fan of Strava, which again can be linked to your MFP account.
I’ve never seen the point of keeping a food diary; how wrong I wasI’ve been seriously impressed at how smoothly all these various things have worked together. All three are both website and app based, and all I’ve had to do is tap the relevant button on the apps to link them up. Then the data is automatically transferred. MFP then tells me how many minutes I’ve exercised and how many calories I’ve burned per day and per week. It’s been really quite eye opening to see just how much I work out these days.
But the real test is whether it’s worked – have I lost weight? Well, yes, I have, though not quite as much I’d hoped. But I have lost size. Those trousers that were a bit tight fit properly again and I’ve gone down a notch on my belt. I suspect the main reason the weight isn’t going down as quickly I wanted is the amount of exercise I do. I’m building muscle tissue and losing fat, which is a good thing. The fact that I pretty much eat my own body weight in crisps whenever I get drunk is probably playing a part too, though.
