Ex-Wallabies and Brumbies player Ben Alexander develops food tracking app, Alfred

"I always ended up in the dreaded Brumbies' Fat Club no matter how hard I tried to avoid it," he said.

Now apparently called the "Sumo Club", the Brumbies' fat club was about meting out punishments to players who didn't meet skinfold - or fat level - targets.

"It mostly involved doing extra training and fitness like sitting on a bike and cycling while facing a wall," Alexander said.

"One year I think we had to clean staff cars."

Alexander is not fazed by it all, it was just the lot of an elite athlete. Getting lean and mean in the pre-season was part and parcel of the job. He hated doing extra training. But he definitely didn't feel body-shamed.

"My own parents called me 'Gobble'," he said, with a laugh.

His battle with his weight was life-long, not just in rugby.

"I was stuck in an endless cycle where I'd either not pay attention to what I was eating and eat way too much or I'd pay too much attention to what I was eating, and starve myself or go on some restrictive diet and try to lose the weight quickly. But eventually I'd burn out and put all the weight back on," he said.

Those days are over, with Alexander, 36, now retired from rugby but busier than ever - husband to Jen and father to three girls, a part-owner of The Dock pub at the Kingston foreshore, a computing student at the ANU and a burgeoning app developer. (Jen also has developed an app as a safe alternative to Facebook called Fam which has 3000 subscribers in the US alone). Alexander's latest app reflects the discovery that literally led to him being a changed man.

At his heaviest, he weighed 128 kilos. He know weighs 102 kilos and is full of energy. He credits food tracking for helping get the weight off and stay off.

"Once I stumbled across tracking my food, I was able to find balance with food, which helped me to lose the weight and I now have more energy than ever before. And I did it all without having to give up the foods I love," he said.

"But when I recommended tracking to my friends and family, they all found the current tools either too complicated or time consuming to use regularly.

"So that led me to build Alfred, a simple food and energy tracker where he can do the work for you."

The name of the app eludes to the butler of a certain caped crusader - "Alfred does all the work so you can go out and become the hero" - and is currently free but will have some premium features down the track, which will require a subscription.

Creating an app sounds overwhelmingly difficult, and it did take years of hard work. Alexander ended up collaborating with Dominic Millar from Xero, the accounting software company. Others joined the team to build and run the app: Abinash Khanal, Arjun Dangal, Dileep Chaudhary, Erin Scott and Duncan Buchanan. University of Canberra Associate Professor Nenan Naumovski is also advising the group.

"I started building Alfred with a relative in 2016 while I was playing rugby and after three failed efforts, the fourth version of Alfred finally made it to the Apple App Store on Christmas Eve last year," Alexander said. It has now been downloaded 500 times.

Subscribers send Alfred a photo or a short text description of their meal, and he estimates the amount of energy in it and returns the results before their next meal. Alfred will also "learn what you like to eat and start predicting your next meal to save you time". The idea is to perfect the amount of food for weight control and maximum energy.

Alexander says University of Canberra nutrition students, led by Erin Scott, are working with him to do the calculations manually but the goal is to have it eventually fully automated. Five thousand meals have been calculated so far.

It's been an almost natural progression for Alexander to move from sport to computing.

"I grew up in Seattle so during the Microsoft boom and Bill Gates but never thought to get into coding. But being around Alfred and seeing my uncle do coding, I really got into it and started my studies."

Alexander says after 30 years battling his weight, he's hit the sweet spot that enables him to be family man, run a business and have time to get the exercise his body craves.

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"Even though I've lost the weight, I still track every day. If I stop tracking, I fall back into bad habits," he said.

"I can't get everything I want to do unless I have the right amount of energy."

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