The purpose of this post isn't for me to tell you about my new workout buddy! My Fitness Pal is an App for your smart phone developed by Under Armour. It is used to help track your food and macro nutrient intake throughout the day and week.

Tracking food intake - everyone has an aim or goal when training in the gym. The most common goals are wanting to loose weight or to gain weight (usually muscle). So what do we have to do? As I've said many times before to loose weight we need to be in a calorie Deficit. This means consuming less calories than you are expending. To gain weight you need to be in the opposite, a calorie surplus, this is consuming more calories than you expend.

The trick is, knowing what your putting into your body, and how much, for example if you are looking to put muscle on but your diet consists of: Weetabix for breakfast, a chicken salad and jacket potato for lunch and then steak and veg for tea. This could be at most maybe 1000 calories, which to put weight on is nowehere near enough.

On the flip side if your looking to loose weight and your having 2 weetabix, a banana, all bran and a yoghurt with a glass of orange juice and 2 slices of toast with jam for breakfast and a jacket potato with chicken pasta bake and a crumpet with butter on for dinner, some form of snack in the afternoon, for tea is a chicken pizza with a bowl of coco pops afterwards. Your more than likely in a calorie surplus.

My Fitness Pal is something we use with every client to track and maintain food intake. If you think in your eating in accordance with your goal its usually very interesting to see if you are over eating or under eating. Your food intake can tell you a great deal about food quality and how much your actually having! Are you getting enough fibre, are you eating towards your protein target (most people don't eat enough protein).

Download the App for free, put your statistics in and your goal and track for 1 week what you intake including beverages (excluding water as it holds no nutritional value, but you should be consuming adequate water anyway!). If your struggling to loose weight or gain weight it will be very beneficial to you and may hold the key to achieve your aim.