I’ve struggled with my weight pretty much my whole adult life. Through all the ups and downs, I’ve discovered a few tips and tricks that make weight loss much easier. Some are fairly obvious, like the keeping in mind that in order to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you consume. It seems really obvious, but when you’re reaching for a donut it sometimes helps to think of how much time it’ll take running or walking uphill on a treadmill to burn through the calories it provides. Another is that a diet should be treated like getting a grade in school– if you stick to it 90% of the time, you still get an A. This can be a big boost mentally– it doesn’t take much to get tired of eating twigs all the time.
The biggest thing I’ve learned is that keeping track of just about everything I do with respect to calories consumed or burned can be key to successfully losing weight. You need to be able to know when you’re more likely to binge. If you make plans to exercise but wind up canceling, you need to know that as well. You need to know what exercises you like to do, and at what times of the day/week you’re more likely to do them.
In addition, I’ve found that this is something that is much easier to do with help. Having a community of people that are going through the same trials as you can be a source of inspiration.
Up to now, I’ve been using a website called PhysicsDiet, which has served the basic function of keeping track of my weight (as well as a few other statistics). PhysicsDiet provides two main benefits for me. The data entry screen provides a table with a good chunk of recent entries, so I can see at a glance how I’m doing. It also has a nifty charting function, which shows linear and cubic best fit curves that give you an additional hint as to how you’re doing.
Unfortunately, PhysicsDiet has some hiccups. The site doesn’t have a “keep me logged in” function. Recently, the developer has worked around this by pre-populating the username and password fields… Which is an interesting approach, but is a bit worrisome from a security perspective. Additionally, the developer has mentioned problems they’ve had with data loss, which is really frustrating. The site’s popularity seems to be on the wane, as well. There used to be hundreds of active users on it, and as of today there are 72. I think I may not be the only one who is discouraged by the problems the site has had.
So since I’m a web developer, I’ve decided that as a bit of a side project that I’m going to start a site that fits my own needs for tracking my weight loss, and hopefully will fulfill the needs of others as well.
Initially, I’d like to just get up a very basic site that enables three things:
- Initial signup, maybe confirmation email and changing password/ account info.
- Logging weight entries.
- Graphing weight entries. Initially, this is going to be pretty simple… Probably just bog standard charts that are made with the built in functionality in ASP.NET MVC 4. I’m a big fan of infographics (like what you find on visual.ly), so I’ll probably put some effort into this part.
I’m planning on doing this in ASP.NET MVC 4, and host it on Windows Azure. Probably use SQL Azure as a data store, as I’m very familiar with SQL Server. The alternative, Azure’s Table Storage service, looks interesting, but I’m not at all familiar with it. Perhaps on another project.
I hope to update this blog with my experiences as I develop this and other projects every few days. Hopefully it’ll be interesting enough to gather a few followers!
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