I started working out in the school gym at the age of fourteen, and then after leaving school purchased my first set of weights. Within a few years I went from a corpulent 10st 10lbs (150lbs, or 68kg) to a leaner and well-muscled 11st 6lbs (160lbs, or 72.5kg), and even during my time at university - an era in my life characterised by binge drinking and a total disinterest in nutrition - managed to keep in good shape through regular weight training and running.
Upon entering the world of work and marriage, however, my weight training was quick to fall by the wayside, and the road to Fat Hell was blocked only by my financially-motivated insistence upon walking to and running home from work and being press-ganged into the occasional long, steep walk. From time to time, usually when egged on by my uncle, I’d drop weight and excel with my running and fell walking - on a sweltering day in the summer of 2009 I finished the Humber Bridge Half Marathon in 1:37:47; on 2nd May 2010, my uncle and I completed the Yorkshire “Three Peaks Challenge” (a 26-mile fell walk encompassing Pen-y-Ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough) in 8 hours and 20 minutes; and on a chilly October morn in 2010 I ran the Bridlington Half Marathon in a personal best of 1:29:41 -, but, more often than not, I’d binge without a thought for my burgeoning frame.
Matters reached a head in early 2011, when I was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis - an aggressive disease that turns your own immune system against you, targeting your joints and attacking them with the same gusto that it would an invading pathogen. Initially only the joints in a few of my fingers and my dominant right thumb were affected, but within months I presented with more significant problems in my heels that made it extremely painful to walk with a normal gait, let alone run, and ultimately put paid to me doing any meaningful form of exercise. When my daughter was born in 2011, my battle for fitness went nuclear - by 1st January 2013, I weighed a (for 5’ 10”) stout 12st 4lbs (172lbs, or 78kg), and the only muscle to be seen anywhere on me were half-hearted lumps where my biceps used to be.
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Inspired by my bodybuilding rock of a brother, I’ve already shed the most offensive of the fat that once encased me, and now I’m working hard to not only to regain the long-lost muscle mass of my youth, but gain better definition too. As you may have gathered from the stat-filled potted history above, I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to data collection and retention, and it’s no coincidence that peaks in my personal fitness levels have coincided with spells in my life when I’ve felt compelled to keep lists detailing my running times and daily calorie intake. Today I’m fortunate in that there are a number of apps available that do all the donkey work for me, obviating the need for laborious booting and logging, and increasing the chances of long-term success. The most effective of these is MyFitnessPal (available free from Apple’s iTunes App Store), which I use between my iPhone and iPad, dependent on where I am..jpg)
At its most basic, the app syncs with your online MyFitnessPal account (it’s quick, easy, and most importantly of all, free to sign up) where you can set your initial goals (these can be tweaked later within the app itself). You can set yourself a goal weight, and even the rate by which you want to lose or gain weight, and MyFitnessPal will calculate the net caloric intake required to achieve your goal. Every time that you have a bite to eat, or something to drink, you simply scan the product’s barcode and, more often than not, its nutritional information will be instantly imported into your MyFitnessPal food diary and offset against your gross daily total. If your food or drink doesn’t have a barcode, you can simply search for it manually, and to my delight the database includes a wide range of (particularly franchised) restaurant dishes as well as common homemade staples. Anything that isn’t there, you can easily add yourself.
Where I’ve found the app really comes into its own though is through its recording of exercise. Until such time as my bro has completed his evaluation of just about every GPS ‘map my run’-style app on the market, I’m using Runtastic Pro (£2.99 from Apple’s iTunes App Store) to record my own runs and strolls, which – once you’ve connected the two apps in the touch of a button - MyFitnessPal automatically imports, offsetting the estimated calorie burn against your gross daily target. From the point of view of someone looking to lose weight, this is a great motivator to exercise, as burning 900 or so calories on a 90-minute run means that you can eat quite freely and probably still be under your daily calorie goal, whereas for someone like me who’s trying to gain muscle mass, it helps to ensure that you aren’t totally killing your gains with excessive aerobic burn.
Another boon for me is the integration of your exercise diary into the app, which allows you to manually add any type of exercise that you’ve done and again claim the estimated calories for it. This is handy if you don’t use a GPS tracker to record your walks and runs, or if you regularly partake in some other form of aerobic exercise, but it’s also invaluable to keep track on strength training. You can record each individual weight-lifting exercise that you do, detailing the weight used and the number of reps achieved, allowing you to keep track of your progress and also spot correlations between food intake and good days / bad days in the gym. You can even record an overall session in the gym as a ‘cardio’ exercise, and MyFitnessPal will estimate your calorie burn for the session. My brother’s of the firm view that the app massively overestimates how many calories are burnt during anaerobic exercise, but I’m not convinced on the point; not unless my metabolism is a veritable furnace, anyway, otherwise I’d be a lot heavier than I am. A final plus point on the diary is the ability to add both food and excercise notes (or, more often than not, excuses).
Another feature that I find useful is the ability to track my progress, and have MyFitnessPal plot graphs, pie charts and the like. As weight variation isn’t always indicative of progress, particularly if your goals are more complicated than to just lose weight, it’s helpful to be able to track measurements (waist, chest, biceps etc) as well as levels of body fat and body water to ensure that you’re moving forward. This has been particularly good for me as my weight has recently plateaued, but I can at least observe a trend of steady muscle growth and fat reduction.
One complaint that I do have though is the app’s patent weight loss bias. It’s quick to give you a pat on the back if your weight has fallen, or you’re under your daily calorie target, but if you gain a pound the colour changes from green to red and you don’t get any encouragement whatsoever. This would be relatively easy to invert dependent upon an individual’s goals, and I hope will be taken into account within a future update.
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A final feature worthy of mention is the app’s social networking side, which I don’t use – I’ve deliberately used a distorted, ‘fat man’ profile picture to deter friend requests – but I can see the benefit of for some people. My brother has a decent following on there that keeps us both constantly amused – the well-meaning comments of other users crack me up daily. The other day the app had posted that my brother had logged in for 65 days in a row, to which some supportive soul had commented, “Nice logging!” That said, the forums on the MyFitnessPal website are full of clued-up people dispensing free dietary advice, so it’s probably worth putting up with the odd bit of mindless enthusiasm for what you get in return.
And so if you’ve got a smartphone or tablet, and are prepared to run the divorce gauntlet by irritating your spouse with constant barcode scanning, then the free MyFitnessPal app is an absolute must. I prefer the iPad version for ease of viewing (the diary display is much more detailed, allowing me to keep tabs on my protein intake) and the iPhone version for use on the move, but whatever device you’re using, with MyFitnessPal on it you’ve got a much better chance of meeting your fitness goals.
