I’m a large man. Some years ago I read about John Walker’s Hacker diet, and I gave it a try. It worked poorly for me, for reasons I now understand, but at least one part of it seemed like a great idea. Walker suggested you keep a weight log, but not any ordinary weight log — one that harnessed the power of statistics to give you a clearer picture of what was going on.
I kept looking for diet tools that used this obvious idea. Well, it was obvious to me, anyway. And so I finally gave up and wrote my own.I wrote it on the iPhone because that seemed like the logical choice. Those of us who have them tend to keep them close. I submitted it to the Apple store on Monday, and it’s currently waiting for its App store evaluation.
It’s a pretty simple app: weigh yourself every morning, log the weight in the app. The app does the statistical analysis (an “exponentially smoothed moving average with 10% smoothing”, or so they tell me), draws you a pretty chart, and you can get a sense of what’s really going on with your weight.
These screenshots are real data — my data. I started my current diet and this app at about the same time. The thin, light, jumpy line is my daily weight check. The thick blue line is the smoothed average. The thin line seems to be all over the place, but the thick line shows a steady, if gradual, decline. I was actually pretty discouraged about the diet until I got that moving average feature working. Then I felt pretty good about it.
Two more things. Most of the weight trackers I looked at previously all assumed you wanted to lose weight — and they wanted to help you get there. That’s admirable, but there’s only so much help I want. I don’t particularly want to be encouraged, cajoled, shouted at, or shamed. So this app doesn’t do that. It just tells you where you are.
If you do want the emotional pressure, the Wii Fit should suit you just fine. But it doesn’t do an exponentially smoothed moving average with 10% smoothing.
I also know that people track their weight for many other reasons. Maybe you’re trying to bulk up. Maybe you’re watching out for drug side effects. Maybe you just enjoy numbers. There are lots of reasons you might want to keep track of your weight that have nothing to do with losing or dieting, so this app doesn’t tell you that gaining is bad and losing good. There are no scary red letters, and that’s by design.
4 Comments
I look forward to giving it a try. I weigh myself every day, but certainly don’t remember what I weighed 2 months ago. I’d like to track it from now on. I could stand to lose some weight, but I like the idea of knowing at a point in time what direction my weight is going.
Thanks, Bob!
It would be nice to be able to see a graphed target, for loosing, gaining or just maintaing. My target has changed over time. I expect it would be a little complicated to show a changing target. I will let you know how I like your app in about a month.
Leland
Thanks, Leland. I elected not to include a “goal” line for a number of reasons, in part because goals change slowly (if at all) and a personal feeling that goals should be rather soft when it comes to weight loss. But I might include that in the next release; it does feel like something is missing there.