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Tweet Your Way to Weight Loss
Posted on Oct 26th 2009 4:00PM by Deborah DunhamFiled Under: Diet & Weight Loss
Forget about confessing a midnight snack splurge to your closest girlfriend, or even to your support group. Now you can tweet your diet successes and failures to the whole world. Twitter's Tweet What You Eat (TWYE) is the latest dieting tool that combines information-age technology with accountability.
While the idea of a food journal is not new, sharing it with thousands of strangers is. Users basically log on to Twitter and tweet every morsel they consume throughout the day. "Recently tweaten" foods are then totaled for calories and reported, along with your weight, to everyone. With more than 8,000 followers to date, creator, Alex Ressi claims it is the easiest food diary you'll ever keep.
There is also an online forum that allows users to post questions, support and feedback. Some tweet about having no idea how much they were really eating until it was on the screen in front of them. One twitter rejoiced about losing eight pounds in the last two weeks; another confessed to eating McDonald's every day for two months.
"Writing down what you eat during the day can help many individuals be more mindful of what they are eating," explains registered dietitian and spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, Joan Salge Blake. "When people keep a food record in between nutritional counseling sessions, they tend to have better adherence to their healthy eating plan."
Some twitters don't agree though. Lucy Cavendish, claimed she had not lost any weight with TWYE. "I think it is because constantly writing down what I eat makes me focus too much on food and that makes me want to eat it," she reported in the Daily Mail. "For some people, the best way to lose weight is not to think about food and that means keeping busy and active and away from the kitchen, not constantly tweeting about it."
Our sister site Lemondrop tells us one other (slightly Big-Brotherish) way Twitter can help you lose weight: a new scale that tweets your weight to the world.
While the idea of a food journal is not new, sharing it with thousands of strangers is. Users basically log on to Twitter and tweet every morsel they consume throughout the day. "Recently tweaten" foods are then totaled for calories and reported, along with your weight, to everyone. With more than 8,000 followers to date, creator, Alex Ressi claims it is the easiest food diary you'll ever keep.
There is also an online forum that allows users to post questions, support and feedback. Some tweet about having no idea how much they were really eating until it was on the screen in front of them. One twitter rejoiced about losing eight pounds in the last two weeks; another confessed to eating McDonald's every day for two months.
"Writing down what you eat during the day can help many individuals be more mindful of what they are eating," explains registered dietitian and spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, Joan Salge Blake. "When people keep a food record in between nutritional counseling sessions, they tend to have better adherence to their healthy eating plan."
Some twitters don't agree though. Lucy Cavendish, claimed she had not lost any weight with TWYE. "I think it is because constantly writing down what I eat makes me focus too much on food and that makes me want to eat it," she reported in the Daily Mail. "For some people, the best way to lose weight is not to think about food and that means keeping busy and active and away from the kitchen, not constantly tweeting about it."
Our sister site Lemondrop tells us one other (slightly Big-Brotherish) way Twitter can help you lose weight: a new scale that tweets your weight to the world.
