Disqus for Where Are My Knees

Guest Post - Sally MyFitnessPal

Saturday 4 February 2012

I've never exactly been a small person, I've always been somewhere between a size 12-16 since I was about 16 years old. And only recently I've found my weight increase for a number of reasons (got a new job which means I can afford tasty food AND share it all with my lovely man!) So before Christmas I knew that I needed to shift a bit of weight because I eat like a HORSE at Christmas (don't we all though?) and I wanted to join the post-Christmas dieters in the new year. So I looked into a few ways of losing weight. There were two problems with me doing this:


1) I LOVE food. I really bloody love food. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, afternoon tea, elevensies. Really offer me some food and I'll take it. I LOVE FOOD.


2) I'm SO lazy. I love nothing more than having alone time with my laptop or watching movies with my man or even when I feel productive and do some drawing it's not exactly like I'm being active. These past times do not aid me in any way for weight loss.


Upon further research into ways to aid weight loss I heard of a little app for the iPhone called "myfitnesspal" and boy, is it good.



It's basically an app that calorie counts. I've read/heard lots of things that make this sound like a bad thing, for example Pauline Quirke on the new Lighter Life advert, but really this app makes it so incredibly easy.


You put in your starting weight, and where you want to get to. It gives you the option of how many lbs a week you want to lose (as a guide-I think it's pretty impossible to lose 2lbs a week every week) and then tells you your new calorie goal for the day.


The point of the app is not to discourage you from eating (oh no, I got told off by it one day for NOT EATING ENOUGH CALORIES - it literally shouted at me) but to encourage you to work off the calories. It's good that it's all there in red and green for you as it's so incredibly simple.


So you basically tell it everything you eat throughout the day, and it has a MASSIVE database of food, I have always found everything I've eaten on there. And what's helpful is that it has a super good barcode scanner so that you can just scan what you've eaten and it'll load it in automatically. You have to work out the weight and portions of bits you've eaten to get the calories but really, the maths isn't that hard.


The same goes for any exercise you do. It has two categories, cardio and strength. I'm not really one for strength-induced workouts so I usually just put in the cardio. As I said I'm really lazy so I put in any sort of exercise that I do throughout the day:


Walking the dog
Walking in general (we don't have a car at the moment-boo)
Hula-hooping
Cleaning (it doesn't burn a lot but it counts!)
Zumba class


Daniel and I treated ourselves to an Xbox with Kinect for Christmas and got ourselves a few dancing games including Zumba and Just Dance 3. Just 20 minutes on Just Dance 3 burns about 100 calories! That's worth about 10 peanut butter m&ms :)


I even cheekily added "standing - playing guitar" once after we rocked out at an Adam Ant concert for a few hours. That burnt a lot of calories!

The last great thing about this app is the progress you make can be seen on a little graph. You just have to remember to weigh and measure yourself regularly and put it in. Seeing the little graph drop gradually is very encouraging!


So I did this for a month before Christmas and lost a total of 1.3kg. I went from 79.9kg (12.6 stone) to 78.6kg (12.3 stone). My target calories for each day was 1270 - so I could eat what I wanted as long as I burnt it off.

I took a break over Christmas because -let's face it- it's impossible to diet over the festive season. So. Many. Good. Thiiiiiings. But I started again on January 2nd and I didn't dare weigh myself over Christmas so waited until the weekend after and was pleased to see I'd lost a bit more! 

I've gone down to 1200 calories a day and am currently at 77.5kg (12.2 stone) and have lost 2.4kg in total!! Having the Kinect has made it much easier to find fun things to do to burn off some calories, and best of all it's in the comfort of my own home with only my puppy dog watching me :)


So that's where I'm at right now, so far so good! A few of my friends use the app too so we can see how each other is doing and send each other little messages of encouragement! If you don't have an iPhone then you can use the website www.myfitnesspal.com and I believe it's now available for lots of other types of phones too!

My own personal aim is to get down to a healthy weight. It's not about looks for me, just feeling healthy - I have far too many dresses that I couldn't bear to part with if I lost too much weight!!

Happy exercising!


6 comments:

  1. i used myfitnesspal to keep me in good habits whilst i had a break from slimming world (a 12 week house renovation pretty much meant i had a microwave and a fridge!) and it really is one of the best apps ever. i recommend it to everyone! even though im back on slimming world, i know that when i get to my target i will use myfitnesspal to keep me doing well. best app ever! x

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  2. I've been using MyFitnessPal as well. Just the website for now even though I do have an iPhone so should probably download the app! I really like using it. It's great that it has the food database so you don't need to know all the calories for everything you eat :) x

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  3. AWhh thanks for this! I too LOVE/enjoy food too much; baking/eating out etc! However, I too have myfitnesspal on my phone! Im not greaaaat at bothering to input all the foods but I do use it to keep track of the exercise I am doing. xxx

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  4. Just downloaded the app and finding it really easy to use -hopefully this will help keep me on track and keep me motivated to continue xo

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  5. I love this app. Honestly, the only way I've been able to lose any weight. I don't have much to lose, I'd say a stone and I've found it so hard in the past. I've lost 5lb so far using this app. It's brilliant and I don't go hungry ever! Xx

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  6. Aww thanks everyone. It really is a top app. I'm down to 75.1kg now (11st 8lbs) which means I've lost 4.8kg (10.6lbs) in all. I can't even describe how much easier weight loss has been with this app. I'm so happy to be back in the 11st margin!! Good luck to everyone else who gives it a go!! :)

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