Tag Archives: dailyburn

Diet, Software

Mealsnap iPhone app impressions

Leave a comment

mzl.pmpdnall.320x480-75The diet hasn’t gotten off to the best start – perhaps starting it the day ahead of the weekend was a bad idea – but I did try out my diet-tracking website’s new £1.79 iPhone app – Mealsnap – which takes a photo of your meal and tells you the calorie count from – I assume – some kind of clever algorithmic photo-analysis and by referencing the food database from Dailyburn.

First impressions, from three or four photographed meals:

  1. It does sometimes work quite well – correctly (near as damn) recognizing what’s on your plate, and giving sensible caloric estimates
  2. There is quite a range for the estimates – as I’m not sure it has any meaningful way of working out how big a piece of bread, for instance, is.
  3. It doesn’t integrate into Dailyburn, so whatever calorie records you make stay in the app .This renders it completely pointless for me.
  4. It takes an age to ‘process’ the photos – so long that it’s easy to imagine that the photos are being uploaded, and being manually viewed and assessed by a warehouse full of monkeys somewhere.

So I think I’ll leave it alone for now. Anyone worked out any other positives?

Diet, Running

Diet disaster, running hiatus

Leave a comment

If I’m honest, the last six months haven’t seen the healthiest eating on my part and I’ve gained some weight – which has made the running much harder. I need to get back into the rhythm of things and I’m making a public resolution here to kick off the obsessive – but effective – diet monitoring I was doing with Dailyburn once again.

I have a half marathon to run this year and a family to be healthy for. So here’s to it!

Food, Personal

Having targets

1 Comment

I’ve talked before about the need to have achievable targets for weight loss, and have set any number of arbitrary goals to help motivate me. There are a few that are coming, metric and imperial, spurious and otherwise.

If I lose 1lbs, I will be below 13 st for the first time in years.

If I lose 2lbs, I will drop below 180lbs for the first time in I don’t know how long.

If/when I lose approx 3.5kg more, I will be a ‘Light Heavyweight‘ for the first time in years. I will also have lost 20% of my body mass this year.

If I lose 4-5kg more, I will happily be in the ‘ideal’ weight class on the BMI scale (pre-wedding target) – no longer overweight!

If I lose 14lbs, I’ll be under 12 stone for the first time in forever.

If I lose 8 kg, I’ll be a super-middleweight.

If I lose 10kg, I’ll be a middleweight.

If I lose 11kg, I’ll be in the middle of my ideal weight band (post-honeymoon goal), and I’ll shift into maintenance gear.

It’s incredibly satisfying to have Wii Fit display the message “you have lost 1 st and 8 lbs”… of course, I haven’t been using it often and I had gained the excess weight to begin with, but gradually getting there…

Cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to no longer being on a diet…