26/09/2026
For a good few years, I’d been dealing with progressively worse joint pain.
Throbbing knees. Aching ankles. Getting up every morning, strapping my knees and then heading out for another physical day plastering.
I felt like I was going round in circles. After speaking with my doctor and trying the usual approaches — tablets for the pain and creams to apply — I still wasn't getting where I wanted to be.
When did your Doctor ask what are you eating?
I've never been asked that question is 50 years.
But yet a vet would ask that question for sure.
For me, managing the discomfort wasn't enough anymore.
I wanted to look at what I could change in my everyday life.
And the obvious place to start was something I had complete control over:
My food.
I took a proper look at what I was eating and drinking every day and dramatically reduced the high-carb, high-sugar and heavily processed foods I'd been relying on:
Bread.
Pasta.
Cereals.
Pizza.
Biscuits.
Crisps.
Chocolate.
Cakes.
Fizzy drinks.
I also stopped making Greggs or Scotmid my first stop before arriving at the next job.
Then I started properly reading labels.
That was an eye-opener.
Some of the shakes and convenience drinks I'd been using because I thought they were healthier options weren't necessarily as low in carbohydrates or sugar as I'd assumed.
I'd been buying products without really understanding what I was putting into my body.
So I changed direction.
I decided to move towards a ketogenic way of eating.
Keto certainly isn't for everybody, and I'm not suggesting everyone needs to follow it. But personally, changing the way I ate made a remarkable difference to how I felt.
Within the first week, I noticed a huge change in my joint pain.
Going from strapping my knees every morning before work to experiencing very little knee pain was an incredible change for me.
I've now been eating this way for around nine weeks.
And something else has happened.
I genuinely don't crave the crisps, chocolate, cakes and other processed foods that used to automatically find their way into my shopping trolley.
Food stopped being something I grabbed simply because it was quick and convenient.
I started thinking about what I was actually eating.
And that experience gave me an idea.
YOUR LIFE. REAL FOOD.
I've never built an app before.
I'm a plasterer, not an app developer.
At times creating it has been confusing, frustrating and incredibly time-consuming.
But I wanted to build something simple based around what I'd learned from changing my own everyday food choices.
Your Life. Real Food. isn't another complicated diet app.
It isn't here to tell you what you MUST eat.
It isn't here to tell you that you have to go keto.
And it isn't here to judge you because you ate a sausage roll or had a bottle of cola.
It's about understanding what you're eating and showing you what you could choose instead.
Tell the app what you've eaten today and it can help you understand your choices, recognise the sugar and carbohydrates in everyday foods and discover simple alternatives that could work better for you.
Check your food.
Scan barcodes.
Understand what's in the food you're buying.
Discover better swaps.
Track your progress month by month.
No lectures.
No judgement.
No pretending everybody needs to eat exactly the same way.
The more I learned about processed foods, added sugars, carbohydrates, blood glucose and insulin, the more I realised how little attention I'd previously paid to what I was actually eating.
That doesn't mean carbohydrates are automatically bad.
It doesn't mean sugar is the cause of every health problem.
And it doesn't mean everybody needs to go keto.
It means something much simpler:
When you understand what you're eating, you have the information to make your own choice.
THE 6-WEEK CHALLENGE
So here's my challenge.
Give yourself six weeks.
You don't have to be perfect.
You don't have to completely change your life overnight.
And you don't have to eat exactly the way I do.
Just start making different choices.
Cut back on the fizzy drinks, sweets, chocolate, cakes, biscuits and heavily processed convenience foods.
Start reading the labels.
Look at how much sugar you're consuming.
Look at the carbohydrates.
Think about how heavily processed the food is.
Eat more real, minimally processed food.
Use Your Life. Real Food. to understand what you're actually eating and discover alternatives when you want them.
Then give it six weeks.
See how you feel.
See what happens to your cravings.
See what happens to your energy.
See whether your weight changes.
See whether your relationship with food changes.
And if you're monitoring things such as blood pressure, cholesterol or blood glucose with a healthcare professional, you can see whether those markers change too.
I'm not promising you'll have the same experience I had.
I'm simply sharing what happened to me.
For me, changing what I ate changed far more than what went into my shopping trolley.
And that's why I built this app.
You're not being told what you should eat.
You're being shown what you could choose.
GIVE YOURSELF 6 WEEKS.
Understand what you're eating.
Make your own choices.
Eat more real food.
YOUR LIFE. REAL FOOD.
Built by a plasterer who simply decided it was time to change what went in the shopping trolley.
For the price of 2 crap No nutrition Bubble teas you could download the app and make some really good changes for yourself
Matt.x
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yourliferealfood.app
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