Picture the scene...
Work’s been stressful over the last few months.
You know you’ve not been making the effort to go to the gym like you used to. Instead, it’s been easier - and felt nicer - to open a bottle of red wine and cheer yourself up with some chocolate. Worst of all, you’ve noticed your jeans are feeling tighter and you’re feeling out of breath walking up the hill for school pick-up.
“I gotta do something…” you convince yourself.
And so the plan gets made; “I’m starting the diet on Monday”.
The last weekend before the diet is a blow-out. Saturday night takeaway, Sunday brunch, chocolate, wine and maybe some more chocolate on top of that!
Then you go to the local supermarket to buy healthy ingredients for the week ahead and of course, the inevitable downloading of the My Fitness Pal app for your phone so you can track what you eat during your diet.
Monday - day one - arrives. You skip breakfast - zero calories. Job done.
Lunchtime arrives and you leave the office. You get a sandwich and some prepared carrots from M&S Food. You scan their barcodes into My Fitness Pal and boom! There it is. All the calories and macronutrients immediately recorded. Dead easy!
Then you get home from work.
Dinner will be a home-cooked tuna nicoise salad. Only now there’s no barcodes. Now you’re weighing those potatoes, onions and rocket leaves. Now you’re searching for eggs and tuna manually on the app.
“This is a pain, but it’s day one of the diet, I can do this…” you’re telling yourself and for a few days you do.
But the barcode issue is a pain. There’s no getting away from it.
Come Friday night of week one, you're losing patience with the tools to help you with the diet.
By the end of week two, you’ve lost patience with the diet.
By the end of week three, the chocolate and red wine is flowing again!
The searching for every ingredient and weighing every item becomes a blocker for your diet which becomes a blocker for you losing weight. In everything we do, convenience is king and diets are no different. The more friction we put in our way, the harder the outcome is to achieve.
Does any of the above sound familiar?
This was my story quite a few times over the last ten years. Every time I repeated the pattern before finally I acknowledged that this was a problem that tech could be used to solve before playing about with a solution; “Friendly Food Tracker” (it does what it says on the tin 🙂 ).
If this story resonates with you, why not give “Friendly Food Tracker” a try for tracking your food.No barcode, no problem.
Chris.
Founder, Friendly Food Tracker
