TrueWeight is a web-based application for tracking weight and calorie intake in order to better manage your weight. The basic idea came from The Hacker's Diet. In it, John Walker lays out the most basic of dieting ideas. If you want to lose weight, you need to eat less calories and exercise more in order to start burning more calories than you take in. Duh.
Where I feel he was ingenious was in his idea to use the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) of your daily weight to accurately track the effects of your calorie intake and exercise. I did this for a month and saw the difference between the high and low weights to be about 7 pounds. Removing all of the fluctuation by examining the EWMA, I saw that I was never more than .5 pound from where I started, which made sense since I hadn't changed anything about what I ate or my activity level.
If you combine this with a detailed look at your calorie intake, you can get a reasonable estimate of how many calories you burn on an average day. I've used many online calculators that ask you to specify age, gender, build, height, weight and activity level and it spits out a number. Since each of us has different characteristics and metabolisms, there's no accurate way given that info to figure out how many calories we use each day.
TrueWeight not only allows you to figure that out, but you have a list of what you ate, so you can see areas where you can cut back on food. You can also see what effect workouts have on you. Perhaps you'll find that if you push yourself to do a half hour of cardio every day burns off more calories than doing a full hour every other day. TrueWeight is a tool that will help determine things like that for you based not on some generalized quiz, but based on actual data from your body.
I have used similar "calorie counting" sites before, but never stuck with them for long. Why? Because the interface was cumbersome. Who wants to click 30 times to add "1 cup coffee, 1 creamer, 2 packs of sugar"? TrueWeight will allow you to lookup the data from the USDA Nutrient Database. It will also allow you to enter personal items, group items together into recipes or combinations, and keep a favorites list of the ones you use all the time. Using "Web 2.0" technologies such as web services and AJAX, TrueWeight gives the users an intuitive and responsive interface. No more tedious multi-click drilling down to find the food you are looking for.
Finally, there is the TrueWeight community. This will give people the ability to form groups with shared space. Examples could be all members of a family or a weight loss group like Weight Watchers. Eventually, I see it being a social networking application of people supporting each other along the path of managing their weight.
Stay tuned.. we're just getting started with all of this.. and you'll get a chance to read about it from the ground up.
If you are interested in Beta Testing TrueWeight, please send an email, and you will be notified when the Beta is released.
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