February 9, 2011
Apps to Share Your Pride at the Gym
By OWEN THOMAS

About four years ago, when I started working at home, I plugged into a laptop to write about Silicon Valley. I made thousands of new friends on Facebook and Twitter, and, thanks to the proximity of my refrigerator, put an additional 35 pounds on an already rotund body.

With so many people anxious to hear the most trivial updates on my life, could I use the friends I added to shed the weight I gained? Eighty-three pounds lighter, I’d say yes.

For 315 days straight, I logged into a Web site or popped out my phone and confessed what I ate, how much I exercised and what I weighed. When I went to the gym, I also checked in on Foursquare, announcing my location to friends and eventually winning the rank of “mayor” of my local gym. When I completed my food and exercise diary, the computer informed my Facebook friends; when I lost weight, it broadcast the news to the world on Twitter.

This sort of oversharing drives some people crazy. EE Times, a publication for engineers, once asked its readers why they disliked Twitter. More than half cited this reason: “I don’t really care what you had for breakfast.”

Yet in my experience, a small set of friends turned out to be intensely interested in what I had for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. Moreover, they wanted to know whether that added up to my caloric target for the day.

And it seems their sustained obsession with my obsession has helped me stay on track. Since last March, when I first got an iPhone, downloaded a host of helpful apps and hooked them up to my Twitter and Facebook accounts, I’ve lost 63 pounds. In the year before, when I dieted and exercised in digital isolation, recording my calories in and out in a so-last-century Moleskine notebook, I lost only 20 pounds.

It’s a limited experiment, without a control set. But Mike and Albert Lee, the developers of MyFitnessPal, the calorie-tracking app I depend upon, say I’m not an isolated case.

By analyzing a sample of 500,000 users’ recorded weights, and tracking that against how many friends they had on the service, the Lees (who are brothers) found that the more friends people had, the more weight they lost. People who added friends on MyFitnessPal, giving them access to their calorie counts, lost 50 percent more weight than the typical user, they say. People with at least 10 friends lost an average of 20.5 pounds.

Other apps and Web sites that can assist you in losing weight or in sticking to an exercise plan with the help of your friends include DailyBurn, Gain Fitness, LoseIt and Social Workout. I depended mostly on MyFitnessPal, which has fine-tuned controls for broadcasting updates and sharing food diaries.

I post my exercise calories and announce the completion of my daily food diary on Facebook, while limiting Twitter posts to weight-loss milestones. I share the details only with other MyFitnessPal users, taking those engineers at their word that they don’t care what I had for breakfast. Other users make their food intake completely public, or use Twitter to announce they’ve completed their daily diaries.

The responses have varied from heartwarming to hilarious. In response to a 1,000-calorie exercise binge posted on Facebook, my friend Jennifer cracked that she “burned 20 calories going through photos.” Another friend, formerly quite athletic, confided to me privately that he’d put on weight but had been inspired to do something about it by my updates. He’s since dropped four pounds.

About a half-dozen acquaintances have signed up to be friends with me on MyFitnessPal, and a handful more periodically comment on my updates with their own jogs, runs or gym workouts.

I’ve also attracted a virtual cheering squad who routinely click “Like” on my Facebook fitness updates, including one friend, Jennie Dal Busco, a corporate lawyer and new mom, who found solace for her limited ability to exercise during her pregnancy through the vicarious viewing of my gym exploits. Now that her daughter has arrived, my friend has taken up jogging with a stroller.

Not everything I do is broadcast on the Internet; I use another iPhone app, GymGoal, to track the details of my workouts. While it’s not equipped for social networking, I do share it in a sense. When my personal trainer asks me how the last week went, I can show him what I did with precision, which makes our sessions more productive.

There are a host of new fitness services starting up that harness social networks. Nick Gammell started Gain Fitness in late December. Mr. Gammell, a former college football player, was never in particularly bad shape, but he struggled to fit exercise into 70-hour workweeks when he became a financial analyst at Google. He’s designing new features into his site, still in beta testing, to let users post public profiles, find exercise partners and share workouts.

Mr. Gammell said the ability to show friends your workouts offers “social proof,” a phenomenon in which people take cues from others’ behavior.

“It’s something I’ve experienced in my own life,” he said. “Once you start working out, and your friends start knowing about it, that’s the biggest factor in their starting to work out.”

I’ve reached my desired weight, so now I need new goals. And that’s where most apps and services fall short.

Foursquare, which offers badges to reward activities as well as check-ins, is no help; I earned its Gym Rat badge for frequent gym attendance in my first month. MyFitnessPal’s broadcasts are geared around losing weight, not maintaining it or adding fitness.

And each new app or Web site adds more time to the routine. MyFitnessPal and Social Workout both let me share my activities on Facebook, as will Gain Fitness, but they don’t integrate with each other or with tracking tools like GymGoal. I’m confident that Mr. Gammell or another clever entrepreneur will solve that technical challenge.

The far more interesting question is how we’ll navigate the changing etiquette of sharing such formerly private details of our lives. Breaking bread together used to be the symbol of an intimate friendship. Will the future require that we disclose how we plan to burn off those carbs?

More in Personal Tech (2 of 11 articles)
App Smart: Checking Out a Lot of Beers, Without the Hangover

Read More »
Close