Kat & Tshepi

MyFitnessPal, a digital tool that supported our weight loss journey.

Hi there,

Welcome to week 4 of the 2024 Weight loss challenge, this is the last week of equipping you with the necessary tools to succeed on your weight loss journey. It has been exactly 21 days since we started the 2024 weight loss challenge(hooray :)), it has been said that “It takes 21 days to build a habit, and 90 days to build a lifestyle”, we hope by now you have build a habit of intentionally taking charge of your health, this you would have done by completing the tasks recommended in the past three weeks. If you are new to the blog or things have fallen off the cracks and you did not manage to complete the tasks, you can make today the first day of your weight loss journey by visiting and going through the content and tasks for week one of the weight loss challenge on this dedicated page.

Habits are crucial in achieving your desired weight loss goal, each and every action you take either helps you achieve your goal or take away from your goal. The tasks you completed in the past three weeks added value to your journey and have reinforced your dedication to your fitness and health. With regards to building habits, James Clear states that every action you take is a vote for the type of person you want to be, so we hope the tasks completed so far have been votes for the healthy person you desire to be. This week, we would like talk about myfitnesspal , a digital tool that has supported our weight loss journey since we discovered it 2021, but before we delve into it let us recap on the past three week’s tasks.

1. In the first week of the weight loss challenge, you set-up a system that will enable you to lose weight. You did this by deciding on your desired weight, you thought of and listed foods that you need to eliminate/reduce from your diet and foods that you need to introduce/increase. Then you committed to one or maybe few physical activities (antidote for stress 🙂 ). Finally, you set-up a tracking table to use at the end of each week to measure, track and review your progress (we recommend doing this one on Sundays:)) .

2. In week 2, you practiced the habit of being aware of the amount of processed foods vs whole foods on your diet. We imagine that you discovered there is more processed foods on your diet than you would like. WHO indicated that there has been a high increase of processed food production and consumption and in some countries over 60% of daily caloric intake comes from processed foods, that is staggering. In completing tasks for week 2 , we hope that you also discovered the need for more whole foods on your plate such as fruits and vegetables.

3. In week 3, you created your own balanced meals, these were the seeds to creating your own healthy diet (yes you can create your own nutritious diet now 🙂 ). A balanced meal ensures that your meal contains sufficient macronutrients and micronutrients for nourishing your body and being healthy, it also ensures that you get consistent energy throughout the day.

In summary, you have created a system of creating a healthy lifestyle, you have cleaned your diet (and are constantly doing so each week), and you have started eating healthily and sufficiently. This week we would like to introduce you to MyFitnessPal , if you have not come across it as yet. MyFitnessPal is essentially a calorie counting App, it enables you to track the calories (amount of energy) you consume from your food choices and gives you a better idea of whether you are eating too much or too little for your weight loss goal. It counts your macronutrients (Carbs, Fats and Protein) when you record the food you are eating, it also gives you an idea of how much sugar, fibre and iron you have consumed and let you know whether you have surpassed your desired caloric limit or not.

We (Kat & Tshepi) have used MyFitnessPal since 2021, it has helped us to know more about the food we eat, our dietary patterns and staying on track on our weight loss journey. Counting calories is not an ideal way to manage your food and should not be a dependency, but it is worth knowing to reduce guesswork on the caloric value of your food. For us, it is not a dependency but we have found that when we count calories we are able to manage and control our food consumption better, so it is not ideal but works for us( we previously captured our own experience of tracking calories in these articles WEEK 8  : Counting Calories and WEEK 9: 2nd Month Progress tracking ).

The last task for the 4-week weight loss challenge is to use MyFitnessPal to track your calories for a week. Simply download MyFitnessPal , setup your weight loss and calorie goals(the app will guide you :)), start logging your food. MyFitnessPal is free to use and it works perfectly on the free version, but you can upgrade to a premium version if you require more features. Have fun with this task, compare various foods, check out the calories of your favorite snacks, we guarantee you will be SHOCKED 🙂 . Below is an example of our food logging from MyFitnessPal.

That’s it for this week, next week we will summarize and wrap-up the 4-week weight loss challenge. If you have comments, suggestions or questions you can comment below on this post or contact us directly, we would love to hear from you.

Until next week, Stay blessed.

Kat & Tshepi