Diary of a fat man – Mango-ProgrammingStorm

Last week I set out to begin a new lifestyle of healthy diet and exercise with the aid of apps . My first choice for dietary aid is Mango – Calories Counter & Diet Tracker . My selection method for this first app was rigorous, by which I mean it was the first diet app I saw in the Lifestyle section of the App Store.

Day one with Mango was a bit of an eye opener, as it asked me for my vital statistics . The whole process was nice and straightforward thanks to the clean and colorful interface: age 35, height 194 cm (6’4”)… nothing new there. Right, weight – I have some scales somewhere. 125 kg (275 lb)! When did that happen? Just four years ago I was 90 kg (198 lb). I suppose trading a life as a kindergarten teacher for a desk job was going to take its toll, but that is nearly a whole other person that I’m carrying around.

The upshot of my horror was that Mango decided I should be able to consume nearly 3500 calories a day to maintain my weight. This baffled me, as I am certain I currently eat less than this, but who am I to argue? However, as my aim is to slim down, so I set a target weight of 85kg (it’s good to dream) and Mango decided that it would take me 50 weeks of eating 2964 calories a day to reach my goal . That’s a lot by the way, 2500 is the average for a man – but I figured it would at least be easy to stick to.

Despite my doubts about how successful this “diet” would be, my first impression of Mango was strong . Five tabs at the base of the screen gave me access to my profile, exercise input, consumption, tracking of my day so far, and a calendar of my time with the app.

Most of my time was to be spent on the food entry pages, as it turns out I consume a lot when you include coffee. It felt constant, but somehow I never seemed to cross the magic 2964 calorie limit .

Or so I think, because my biggest issue with Mango is that it demands you know the weight of everything. This isn’t just a problem when eating out. Just take my lunch time routine, I tend to make a large stew (or similar) on Sunday which I portion and freeze for the rest of the week. Even if I measured everything I added to the pot, I would still be left approximating the individual ingredients in any given meal – a painstaking and inaccurate task.

It was an issue that persisted for the whole week. Every item I added food or drink, the measurement started at 100g, leaving me to dial it to (or guess) the right measurement. All of this is done through use of a slider, but it feels infuriatingly fiddly. For example I take sugar in my coffee, no real idea how much but let’s say 6g, so I have to dial it back 100g (imagine 100g of sugar in your coffee) to five then use a button to fine-tune it up a gram. It is all just a little too… scientific . It needs natural measures (cups or spoons) or at least a default its measure that could be considered a standard portion.

Exercise is tracked in a similar fashion, but somehow feels more rounded. Each choice has estimates for the calories burned for each minute of an exercise. For instance, Mango predicts that a nice 3 km/hour walk will use 2.5 cal/min, while competitive cross country skiing burns a whopping 14 cal/min. Unfortunately, Mango doesn’t seem to adjust to your body size, and I am pretty sure my 125 kg frame running burns more than it did when it was 90 kg.

All of my data was tracked on a single main page in a mesh of stylish hexagons alongside a nice illustration of a character that filled with red as I used my day’s calories. This screen also gives access to a nutritional breakdown of day’s food but never offers any advice to improve diet – meaning if I wanted to I could just eat 600g of Twix a day.

I spent a week adhering to Mango calorific limits and was expecting to see some effect as I stepped back on to the scales – especially as the first week of dieting is usually the most impactful. Not this time, however, as my scales told me that, if anything, I had gained a little weight.

So it seems that, even with careful monitoring of my eating habits and my regular use of the Daily Yoga app, I have become no healthier this week … hopefully my next two weeks with MyPlate will prove more successful.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply