Guest Post - Sally MyFitnessPal

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!

Sally xx