Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I'm in Scotland visiting my boyfriends nan for a week and we didn't realise she had no reception so I haven't been able t blog until we connected everything up.

Anyway, onto today's post. I'll be talking about MyFitnessPal(MFP). MFP is a tool that I have been using during my weight loss journey. I have currently been using MFP for about 8months and I love it.

MFP is a website that is used for calorie counting and exercise tracking. I know that calorie counting can be a tedious process but MFP makes everything really easy and way more manageable.

Here are a few reasons why MFP has been my preferred choice for weight loss:

Setup is incredibly easy - When signing up to MFP, you have to enter some settings for your account. These includes the basics such as age, height, weight, how much exercise you do a week, your activity level and how much you want to lose a week.

Once all this has been entered, MFP works out your daily calorie allowance based off the information you gave and how much you want to lose. For a lot of people, it sets the calories for 1200 a day and I found this to be too low for me. Yu have the option to enter and change settings that you want if you would like to eat more than this.

MFP automatically creates a deficit based on your goal for lbs to lose per week. This means that when you track exercise on MFP, you have the choice of whether or not you want to eat your calories back (bear in mind that you create a bigger deficit by not eating your calories back).

There is a huge food database - When entering food onto MFP, you do not have to look at every single food packet counting calories. On MFP there is a food section where you can search for the foods that you have eaten and enter them into your food diary.

When food is entered into your diary, it gives a summary of you Macro-nutrients (such as carbs, fat, protein) for the day that you need to meet.

You can track your workouts - If you like to track your workouts for the week then this is possible on MFP. You can track both cardio and weights training or add your own exercise. Granted, the calories burned calculations are not always accurate and I have noticed that MFP overestimates my calorie burn so I have a HRM to track my calories burnt during workouts for more accurate results.

There is a very large community for help - MFP has a very large community for help and advice. There are forums to post queries that you might have and friends can be added for daily motivation.  I have used the forums a lot for any queries about weight loss that I've had. Everyone has been very helpful and given good advice.

Ability to use MFP with mobile devices - The one great thing about MFP is that there is an app that can be downloaded on mobiles and other portable devices such as iPads if you don't have access to a computer all the time. The app has the basic features of MFP which include the food and exercise tracking and also has the added feature of scanning food barcodes instead of searching for products.

Overall, I think MFP has been an amazing tool for my weight loss and I will continue to use it on my weight loss journey. However, I do not think that this is something I want to keep doing long term. Eventually I would like to stop tracking my calories and do it all by myself when I start maintaining my weight.