Lose It! for the web and iPhone make it easy to track your food and exercise
Twitter, Facebook and a website/iPhone app called Lose It! are helping me lose weight. I’m not about to write a diet book, but if I were, I think I’d call it the Social Media Diet (though “Twitter Diet” might be more marketable.)
Three weeks ago, I started measuring all the calories I’m consuming and burning and am posting my progress on Twitter, Facebook and at NoBellyPrize.com. I’m even using a $159 electronic scale from Withings that automatically tweets my weight every time I step on it.
The mere act of posting doesn’t cause me to lose weight — the social commitment of being public about it certainly does. I’m not sure if it’s the positive feedback from friends or the fear of public shaming, but it works. So far, I’m on target at two pounds a week.
This is hardly the first time I’ve gone on a diet. In 2002 I started writing a weekly column about fitness for the Palo Daily News, after losing 50 pounds. My weight stayed reasonably stable during the column’s run, perhaps because it would have been humiliating for a fitness columnist to gain weight.
Since the column’s end in 2006, I’ve put some weight back on. I don’t want to get as skinny as I was last time, but I do want to drop down to 165 pounds, 21 pounds lighter than I was three weeks ago.
The weight-loss diet that worked so well for me in 2001 was supervised by a nutritionist. But the reason it worked wasn’t simply because she was more knowledgeable than I about nutrition, but because I had someone to report to each week.
On my Social Media Diet, I’m reporting to and getting feedback from a wider community on Facebook and Twitter.
Track My Progress
You can track my progress on Twitter @NoBellyPrize or my blog at NoBellyPrize.com. .. Any way you choose, you can become one of my “diet counselors.”
Of all the tech tools I’m using, the most useful is Lose It!, which is both a website and iPhone App. The free site and app exchange data between them and are easy to use. It can also be configured to share your progress on Twitter and Facebook.
It has an extensive food database as well as a tool to add foods or recipes. Lose It! also lists many exercises and the calories each burn.
The application and website estimate the calories you’ve burned based on your weight. The program is based on the scientific fact that 3,500 calories equals a pound. Although there are other health factors to consider, from a pure weight-loss perspective it doesn’t really matter whether you load up on fats, carbs or protein, as long as the calories you burn exceed the calories you take in.
Larry Magid is a technology journalist and an Internet safety advocate. He serves as on-air technology analyst for CBS News, is co-director of ConnectSafely.org and founder of SafeKids.com and SafeTeens.com. He also writes columns that appear on CNET News, CBSNews.com, Huffington Post and the San Jose Mercury News.
His technology reports can be heard daily on CBS News and CBS affiliates throughout the U.S. and he has a daily tech segment on KCBS radio in San Francisco. He’s a regular contributor to BBC World Service and an occasional guest on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation. He is often called upon for commentary by CBS television news, CNN and Fox News and has appeared on the CBS Evening News, ABC World News Tonight, the Today Show and CBS Early Show. He has also been a frequent contributor to the New York Times and was, for 18 years, a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
He has written several books including the best-selling Little PC Book and is co-author (with Anne Collier) of MySpace Unraveled.
Larry served on the Obama Administration’s Online Technology Working Group and the Berkman Center’s Internet Safety Technology Task Force.
