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In this little series of blogs, there are little things that I have tried to use to make myself a little bit better (and generally failed).

The next one I want to chat to you about is an app that I use called My fitness pal.

I was introduced to this by my friend and soon to be in practice colleague, Carl Dunstan about a way of holding myself to account for my emotional attachment to carbohydrates.

Remember that you’re reading something written by a guy who was 18 stone when he arrived in Nottingham in 1995 and is currently weighing in at somewhere round about 12 and a half.

The journey from there to here has been up and down, literally. But before I started university as a 17 year old I was 12 stone.

Over the intervening 24 years, I have tried every single strategy known to man to get my weight under control and to stop the “boom and bust” that an addiction to refine sugar and carbohydrate attracts.

In particular it is chocolate and in particular, Dairy Milk chocolate.

It is not a word of a lie that I could eat a 370g bar of Dairy Milk in the space of 10 minutes and not know that I had done it (I call that carbohydrate amnesia).

Generally, I would do this after 8pm in the evening.

What my fitness pal does is, it dials in accountability to calorie intake during your day.

It might not work for you, but it might and it certainly works for me.

I dabbled with this last year for my big cycling event in Italy and got down to 12 stone 3 (the lightest I had been for perhaps 30 years).

Some weeks ago, I got back to it again after a break and I hit below my calorie target every single day for 5 weeks.

The concept is similar, calories in are measured against calories out and if you have an exercise app that you use, (mine is Training Peaks, I will talk about that in another blog) It locks in your exercise sessions too.

You can store your meals and store your ingredients and after a little while it becomes super easy to add in.

Sometimes you have to make an estimate and that is ok and as long as you don’t cheat yourself, watch what happens.

It is often about this time of year that people start to look at that and when their trousers are too tight, if you are looking for something, have a look at that, there is a free version and if you don’t mind the adverts (and I really don’t) it will cost you nothing really, a part from a little bit of attention.

Blog Post Number - 2230