How Gadgets May also help Eat Better [Video]

Anyone who’s dieted knows how difficult sticking to it can be. Most diets aren’t one-size-fits-all, and although they were, it’s hard to skip that second slice of pie now once you won’t notice the consequences for weeks. Technology to the rescue!

Music by Rappy McRapperson

I’m turning 30 in March, and if ever there were a time that New Year’s resolutions lined up with a want to eat better and improve my health and fitness, it’s this year. So I’ve committed to getting on top of my diet, eating healthier, and, yes, losing a couple pounds. So let’s talk slightly in regards to the problem with numerous diets-or a minimum of the largest problem I’ve always had. (You may get the gist within the video above. 1 )

One of the harder problems regarding maintaining a healthy diet is that food has a terrible feedback loop. You’ll overeat today, but you don’t notice the implications until a couple of weeks later once you’re waistline’s grown a number of inches. If, alternatively, your pants stopped fitting the moment you ate that third slice of pie, you’ll think carefully about eating it. 2

Instead, your eating habits are left only for your self control, and with that long feedback loop, it’s hard to stay properly motivated. On top of that, my body isn’t like yours, and neither of us may work the baseline model used with diet programs.

Technology can improve this feedback loop, give us an improved idea of the way our bodies handle the calories we absorb, and ultimately make it easier in an effort to exercise self control by making it easier to realise what’s really occurring along with your diet before you’ve got to buy looser clothes.

Several gadgets aim to assist solve this problem, and inside the next couple of months, I’ll be testing a couple of of them, starting with the BodyMedia FIT armband. This little gadget tracks the calories you burn (and, incidentally, your sleep quality), and integrates that information with an internet site packed with pretty charts and graphs. Together with tracking the calories you spend, it also permits you to track your intake and, hopefully (in case you’re aiming to shed weight), your deficit.

Over the following few weeks, I’ll use the FIT to track my diet, then report back. After that I’ll move onto the Fitbit .

[1] I misspoke at the top of the video, conflating the BodyMedia FIT and the Fitbit, calling it the BodyMedia FitBit. Sorry about that. [ go back ]

[2] I’m ripping off this feedback loop bit from Aza Raskin, who recently left Mozilla to form a health startup called Massive Health . Massive Health can be aiming to fix this problem, though they’re currently in an overly early startup stage. [ go back ]

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This post is tagged: baseline model, eating habits, feedback loop, health and fitness, internet site