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Weight Tracking and the High Cost of Being Overweight

According to the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, in 2003-2004, an estimated 66 percent of U.S. adults were overweight or obese, along with 17 percent of children and adolescents. The total annual cost of obesity was an estimated $117 billion in 2000.

Take ScoreJ.D. has a great article up at Get Rich Slowly talking about the high cost of being fat. He really digs into the experiences of his own life and how being overweight has impacted his mental sharpness, happiness, and productivity. Not to mention the shorter average life span that comes with the extra pounds. It is a great post and the quote above is from his article.

After reading this I got to thinking about how people use my applications and what enhancements could be added to help people “cut the fat.”

  • You can use Joe’s Goals to track your health goals…

General health is, by far, the most common way Joe’s Goals is used. People track sleeping habits, eating, exercising, water intake, and even vitamins. One guy even set up a couple of goals so he can give him self a check if he gets up before 9:AM and an X if he gets up after 11:AM. But you can’t really track or trend detailed information about your habits.

  • And you can use other tools to track your daily weight, colories, etc…

While Joe’s Goals makes it easy to track individual lifestyle goals and Joe’s Logbook lets you add notes, it doesn’t (yet) offer any effective way to track numeric goals such as your daily weight, calorie intake, or blood pressure. J.D. mentions FitDay as a way to do it and Lester wrote in to let me know about Weight-Tracker and Blood Pressure Tracker. There are also other solutions out there such Google Spreadsheet or Num Sum (or simple old Excel). But none of these options really ring true for me. I wouldn’t use them, so why would I expect other people to?

  • But how can Joe do better?…

I would like to build something as flexible and friendly as Joe’s Goals to help you and everyone else track health information and the like. My question is, what would you do differently than what is out there? What additions or changes would make Joe’s Goals a better platform for managing your diet and weightless efforts? I realize it can be used right now to help encourage you in your goals, but I also want it to help you meet those goals in a very practical way. I’d be delighted with any feedback or suggestions you have. Feel free to comment or just use the feedback form.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 7:28 pm and is filed under other stuff, joes's goals, testimonies, how to, life hacks. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Weight Tracking and the High Cost of Being Overweight”

1

I use Excel files from The Hacker’s Diet. I like the graphs I can get, and calculated trend. The trend is a much better measure than daily weight.

2

Thanks for pointing out Weight-Tracker and Blood Pressure Tracker - I hadn’t known about them. I like what they track (I will be using both the optional bodyfat percentage and the optional pulse columns) and their graphs - they have moving averages, which is the same idea as the trend in the Hacker’s Diet. The entry system could use a Joe’s Goals style interface, though.

You could add “number tracker” as a third kind of item (I’m sure you could come up with a better name), where the user configures the item with a name and units and enters a number each day, and under advanced options the user could have the item track two or three such numbers as a related set, and another advanced option to turn off the moving average in the accompanying graph.

Comments could easily be a LogBook item, so I wouldn’t bother trying to include that in the number tracker.

3

As far as food intake tracking, I haven’t quite found what I want yet. Your LogBook is too small for tracking everything one eats in a day. Most tracking sites are there to help you count calories, but to do that you have to measure the quantity of everything, and that’s just too difficult for me.

What I would want to track for each eating session is: what I ate (quantities optional), start and stop times (both optional) because sometimes it takes me a while to eat something and because timing of what eat is an issue for me, and a few checkbox items like your Goals when I want to evaluate the quality of what I’m eating, eg, fruits and vegetables get checks, fast food gets X’s. Folks who are tracking calories or Weight Watchers points would want a number tracker.

All that is big enough to take a seperate screen from the main Joe’s Goals screen, but you could include a summary of some sort in the main grid. Let’s see, on the food grid, each day would be pretty wide as it would contain columns for time, what eaten, and the checkboxes.

Another thing I would want is an alternative display for printing - I’d want the gridlines to show up when printing black and white and some extra space for writing. This would provide a simple temporary offline tracker until I get back to a computer to do data entry.

4

I’ve been using the logbook to track my weight since it was released. I figured if I wanted to graph it I could import the CSV into Excel.

I had planned to submit feedback to suggest a “number tracker” like the person above suggested. It would be great for weight tracking, but also all kinds of other stuff that might be useful to track and graph (miles walked, pushups done, minutes watching TV, etc).

Maybe you could put minimum or maximum boundries for the number items that would give you positive or negative points. +1 if you do at least 10 pushups, -2 if you watch over two hours of TV, etc. Maybe that’s getting a little more complicated than needed. The simplicity is one of the reasons I like Joe’s Goals.

5

I’ve only just started using your cool tool here and I can see myself digging the simplicity. As I was entering items though, most of them end up being habits I wish to acquire with a few negative habits I wish to stop. Thing is for each item, only positive checks can be made (or only negative ones) and more “goal” items will bias the graph positive, which can be a good thing if looking for a positive graph to make one feel good. I think I might suggest a more unbiased calculation, one where for each goal/habit, one can place a positive (a check), a negative (an x), or nothing, which might be more appropriate for many types of goals. It would allow for penalty.

E.g. if one wishes to exercise daily, s/he could place a +1 when that action is performed or a -1 when it is not (or nothing when it’s a day off). In the current system, you’d need complimentary goal and anti-goal entries which muddles things a bit.