My Net Diary Weight Loss App

My cousin told me about this great new app that can help you lose weight by keeping a proper record of how much calories and fat you consume. It's called MyNetDiary and you can get two versions, a free version or the pro version which costs £6.99. I have been using the free version, and I have found everything I need on it. You can get the app for ipad or iphone, but you can also just use the online website version if you don't have an apple product.

You can see the app here on my iphone... it is the green icon of an apple with a tape measure around it

I know that it can be quite annoying to have to stand (in a shop or in the kitchen) and work out the calories of everything we eat and then try and remember how many we have already eaten, so I find that the best thing about this app is that it already has the nutritional values of most foods recorded... all you have to do is search for the item and type in how much of it you intend to eat to get the calorie and fat count and other nutritional info such as protein and carbs.

If there is a product that the app does not already have stored, you can use the camera of your iphone/ipad to scan the item barcode. The nutritional information of the product will then be stored in the app - very handy when you're on the go and need to grab a quick supermarket sandwich! 

I use this app alongside the Slimming World plan. I feel it helps me control my portions sizes. I am sometimes tempted to add a little more chicken or just a spoonful more rice to my meals, when really I don't need them. I found that this was were most of my extra calories were coming from and why my weight-loss sometimes stalls with Slimming World.

When you first download the app it asks you to type in your gender, height, current weight, goal weight and age. It then asks you to select on what date you would like to achieve your goal weight, but this is the important bit - it will only allow you to lose up to 2lbs per week and will adjust your goal weight date to fit this - this is so that your body loses the extra weight in a healthy way. Crash dieting doesn't work in the long term.

It is possible to lose more than the recommended 2lbs per week if you don't use up all your calories in one day - for instance, I am on track to lose a further 2.2lbs this week, as yesterday I was 152 calories below my suggested calorie intake for the day.

The app takes into account all the factors you type in and tells you how many calories you need to consume to stay at your current weight - this can sometimes be a shock! It then tells you the defect of calories needed to help you lose weight and the recommended amount you consume daily.  It also records the exercise you do daily and the amount of calories you burn doing each exercise.

It is also helpful for meal planning. Every morning I can type in what I plan on eating for the day and it will tell me the amount of calories that will use up and the amount that I will have left.

For instance, this is my 'overall' plan for the day -

You can see that I still have 156 cals remaining and have not factored in any exercise - I prefer to type the exercise in after I do it, as the number of calories available increases with exercise.

This is the breakdown of each meal -

I usually use most of my calories for dinner - I work in an office and sit at my desk for the majority of the day, this means I don't use a lot of calories and am often not as hungry. I usually exercise after work and do some housework etc which means I use more calories and am hungrier, so therefore my evening meal is usually more filling.

This is what my dinner will look like tonight -

As you can see I am having chicken and veg curry with boiled rice.


I would recommend everyone to give this a go as it is free and could work really well with helping you on your weight loss journey!