Health and Fitness
Twitter evolved incredibly since it was launched. Actually (and ironically), the service itself hardly changed at all, unlike the way people have been using it.
Started merely as a “What are you doing now?” concept, the service has now such an overwhelming number of alternative uses that you could never believe it! You can use Twitter as a poll or a survey tool, as a money management tool and now also as a way to track weight loss.
But why use Twitter to track your weight?
Well, first of all, because it’s fun! Sometimes having some fun is the key to achieving your weight loss goals – this helps you to stay motivated and enjoy keeping fit.
And secondly, you are on Twitter anyway! Why not use it to get reminded of your weight loss stats? It can be an easy way to record and track your weight, so give it a try!
Now let’s take a look at the tools I managed to find:
1. Track Weight Loss With Twackit
Twackit is a fun tool I found through this post listing some cool Twitter apps for fitness. It allows you to use your Twitter account to track any metric (like your weight!) and watch trends over time with help of a Google-driven chart.
The good thing is that it needs no registration. Just tweet a numeric value and a hashtag to @twackit:
The bad thing is that the process is totally public. Everyone sees your weight and aside from that, everyone can go to the site to see your weight loss chart (just in case you are one of those who, quite understandably, thinks that this data should be private).
Once you’ve started twacking, view your report at
http://www.twackit.com/your-username/your-hashtag
Another similar tool that tracks various metrics you Tweet and requires no registration is gtFtr but it mostly focus on workouts and supports a limited number of hashtags/commands:
- Stats (or Day or Daily) – this has to come first so the parser knows it’s recording daily stats.
- Steps 9000 – How many steps did you take today? You can also use S or Step for short.
- Cals 800 – How many calories did you burn (that’s what it’s all about after all)?
- Dist 3.9 – How far you went?
2. Weight Loss Charts
Weight Loss Charts is another interesting Twitter-based tool which my friend, Eric of buildmuscle.org found for me. I don’t think I would be able to find it myself as it appears to be quite new.
It does require registration which went quite smoothly. On signing up, you are offered to add Twitter and Gtalk bots to your buddy list. After waiting a while, the bots add you as their friends. You will also need to set your preferred unit of measuring (I am using kilogram).
Now all you need to do is to send any of the bots your daily weight and the info will be recorded on the site.
One of the most useful features of the tool is its reminder because it is really not easy to remember to record your weight on a daily basis. If you forget to tweet your weight, the Twitter bot will remind you to.
You can access your weight loss (hopefully) chart any time after logging in:
Let me know if you would use any of those tools to track weight loss! Also, if you’re not already following MakeUseOf on Twitter, you really should.
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