Using Apps to Build a Better Body

Posted By elissa on Feb 11, 2011 | 2 comments

I’ll be honest: I’m not a big social-media enthusiast. Nor do I own an iPhone, Blackberry, or any other pocket digital device.  But that’s me… plenty of others can get some inspiration from this NYT article by Owen Thomas, which details how he used his apps and social networks to lose a whopping 63 pounds.

For 315 days straight, I logged into a Web site or popped out my phone and confessed what I ate, how much I exercised and what I weighed. When I went to the gym, I also checked in on Foursquare, announcing my location to friends and eventually winning the rank of “mayor” of my local gym. When I completed my food and exercise diary, the computer informed my Facebook friends; when I lost weight, it broadcast the news to the world on Twitter.

This sort of oversharing drives some people crazy. EE Times, a publication for engineers, once asked its readers why they disliked Twitter. More than half cited this reason: “I don’t really care what you had for breakfast.”

Yet in my experience, a small set of friends turned out to be intensely interested in what I had for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. Moreover, they wanted to know whether that added up to my caloric target for the day.

And it seems their sustained obsession with my obsession has helped me stay on track. Since last March, when I first got an iPhone, downloaded a host of helpful apps and hooked them up to my Twitter and Facebook accounts, I’ve lost 63 pounds. In the year before, when I dieted and exercised in digital isolation, recording my calories in and out in a so-last-century Moleskine notebook, I lost only 20 pounds.

It’s a limited experiment, without a control set. But Mike and Albert Lee, the developers of MyFitnessPal, the calorie-tracking app I depend upon, say I’m not an isolated case.

Check out the rest of the story!