30th
Adventures in Fatblogging
It’s no secret that I keep a fatblog. I find it a lot easier to lose weight when I have support from people also trying to lose weight, and I would be mortified to join WW or a similar in-person program - it’s so much easier to show my scale to a bunch of people I may never meet in life than to people that I just met five minutes before. So for the last year and some change, I’ve been posting food journals, weight loss (or gain) updates, before and after photos, frustrations and joys to a private weight loss community on LiveJournal.
A friend passed me a link to a new social networking site for people in the process of losing weight - http://www.fatsecret.com. I have to say, the name was a huge turnoff - if we could keep it a secret that we’re fat, we probably wouldn’t bother trying to lose the weight (save for the people who are actually doing it for urgent health reasons). Anyway, the site’s tagline is “the secret is out” (duh, somewhere between the size 44 pants and the 3xl shirt, I think people started talking), and it goes on to proclaim the site as “A new place to find out what works.”
Apparently, what works is following a diet that’s been featured in a book, on Oprah, or on TV ads. All the big plans are here, in a graph on the homepage ranking them by the number of followers: Fat Smash, South Beach and Atkins are leading the pack. In fact, there are 45 diets listed, from Nutri-System to Shangri-La to something called the 3-Hour Diet. Although there’s no option for my own “Put Down The Fork” diet, there is a place on fatsecret for people who aren’t on a short term diet.
The social networking component of the whole thing seems to be on point for someone like me, who needs the support and feedback on what they’re doing right or wrong. That’s the one thing that I think fatsecret has over a site like FitDay, where you can input everything you’ve eaten, all of your exercise, nutritional goals, weight loss goals, and get reports on how you’ve been eating, calories burned, and excesses or deficits, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of interaction with other site members.
The short-terminess of it all bugs me - a lot of these diets are short-term plans that are followed for anywhere from a week to 90 days, some possibly longer. The person following the diet is sent out into the word with no real idea of how to eat while OFF the plan in order to maintain the weight loss they’ve achieved or lose more weight. If I spent a week eating cabbage soup as my main source of nutrition, I’d be headed straight to Potbelly’s with a stop at Cold Stone once that week was over.
If FitDay and fatsecret could mesh, to have the number crunching functionality of FD and the social aspect of FS, I would be SO sold on that.
