I didn’t even bother trying to amend my ‘Christmas eating plan’ (5-a-day of cake and chocolate) last week, well it was still Christmas. But now the tree’s come down and I can comfortably rest cups of hot chocolate on my stomach, it’s time to wean myself off sugar.

Going completely cold turkey would be impossible and also pretty stupid – guaranteed to send me straight back on sugar for the shock. (For more on this, see our feature on making resolutions you’ll be able to keep).

So I’m aiming to come up with a ‘balanced’ approach to eating over the next few weeks. Hence the reason I had fruit for breakfast, a nourishing soup for lunch and Christmas cake for dinner yesterday.

And – my new online best friend tells me – I’m on target to lose my Christmas fat by mid Feb! My new online best friend is www.myfitnesspal.com. Tell it your current weight and your target weight, how much you want to lose per week (one pound is recommended) and it will do you a daily calorie plan. Enter details of everything you eat and it will tell you how many calories you’ve consumed. It has a huge database of foods – it knows for example how many calories in an M&S ready meal, a Sainsbury’s soup and a carrot.

Tell it how much exercise you’ve done that day (cleaning the house counts, as does gardening and all the other stuff you might be tempted to do in January – going to the gym for example, yikes) and it adjusts your daily calorie plan to let you eat more. (I could eat cake for dinner yesterday because I went to the gym first.) The more you exercise the more you can eat. I like this basic approach.

So far today I’ve eaten an apple, a pear, a banana and a Ryvita cracker and I have almost 900 calories left. But if I get off the bus a few stops early and walk briskly for 15 minutes I’ll get a few of those calories back. My Fitness Pal is the site that tells me, yes, my bum is starting to look pretty huge in this and it’s time I did something about it. But still let’s me eat cake!

This month: Free Fitness First pass in Prima
Buy the February issue of Prima and get your free 5-day pass for Fitness First. If you like your gym experience, Fitness First offers a Jump Start package for the month of January - 4-weeks membership and two 40-minute personal training sessions at a discount, find out more at www.jumpstartyourfitness.co.uk (prices from £44.95).

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