Quicktip: record your meals before eating them

If you use a diet planner or a food diary, enter your meals before you eat.

It’s too easy to spoon on another helping of mash potato, only to discover that you’ve gone over your calorie / carb limit for the day.

What a waste – and for such little extra enjoyment.

If you enter your planned meal into your food diary you can see the warnings before you exceed your targets – and take corrective action.

Disaster averted!

The lazy way to plan your meals

The LazyFit ethos of weight loss is that different approaches work for different people. You need to experiment to discover the right method for you.

Eat This Much helps you test a number of different dietary approaches to see which might be right for you.It describes itself as an autopilot for your diet – tell it your height, weight, aim and even your dietary approach (vegetarian, keto, Paleo, Zone, etc) and it spits out a week of foods for you to eat. Even more impressively, it allows you to include or exclude particular foods, like beans or sardines, and asks you to give an idea of how much prep time you’re willing to spend on each meal – and even how many meals you wish to eat and how much you’re willing to spend.

Admittedly, it would be helpful if it was able to account for leftovers. Pricing aside, I feel awful if I waste food and the systems menus were generating options that required 1/3 a pack of cream cheese for the week. Being a US-originated site, you many not be able to buy every ingredient it suggests, although in my testing there were few that I could not substitute. In addition, for city-dwellers like myself not everything on the weekly grocery list will be available in my local Tesco Metro. But these are all solvable issues and the system is still in its early days.

I was impressed with the range and variety of recipes available, and that these recipes were even provided in the weekly ‘what you’re eating’ list.

Of course, real life can frequently get in the way of a rigid diet plan. Drinks with friends or meals out cannot be easily incorporated in any meal planner. But if you allow a ‘contingency’ number of calories per week for this then Eat This Much is a very clever way to use a database-driven system to give you specific, personalised advice.

• Eat This much