Around Thanksgiving of this year my company, BitMethod, released an iPhone App into the iTunes Store that takes a completely different approach to weight loss tracking and logging than any other tool I've used. I stumbled onto this idea completely by accident and I wanted to outline the history of how it happened since I find it interesting and I figure others might as well. Lite Weight is the child of a lot of different ideas and philosophies that I've enjoyed learning about over the course of my weight loss journey.

My first discovery, as I remember it, was The Hacker's Diet. Though I now believe that the idea of nutrition as a "Rubber Bag" is a limited view of nutrition, I really enjoyed the authors insights into weight tracking. To quickly summarize: even if you enter your weight in wearing the same clothes, at the same time every day, your weight can change a substantial amount. Dehydration and exercise can cause weight to fall, a big meal can leave extra weight in your belly, and both salt and carbohydrate intake can cause water retention. The author proposes that weight should be tracked using a moving average so that your actual weight can be approximated amid all those changes in the amount of water in your body. Many approaches are proposed in the book to do this weight charting, but I used the excellent site, Physics Diet, to use as my weight loss journal.

Quite a while after this, I stumbled over the book, The Overfed Head, though I'm going to skip over this for now, since it didn't play a part in Lite Weight until near the very end of development.

But the idea that really led to Lite Weight was gleaned from an article on how the web and weblog have changed writing. A professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT proposed that all one needs to do to lose weight is to draw a line from your current weight to a goal weight and plot your weight each day. If your weight is over the line, eat less and if your weight is under the line, eat as normal. This professor's name is Steve Ward and his diet is known as The Steve Ward Diet or The Bang-Bang Diet (bang-bang because of a type of controller that is either on or off based on some input)

Lite Weight didn't immediately pop into my head as soon as I had learned all of these ideas. Really, I don't know what ultimately led to the idea. It was probably while walking around downtown Des Moines or raking leaves in my yard. But I think the thought at the time was along the lines of "why can't I write a program that tells me how I should behave based on my weight loss history".

My early attempts at putting together some tool didn't make me very happy. I was still buying into the view of Steve Ward that some goal weight should be set to be reached at some goal date. It was great in terms of development because the math is really easy, but it sucked in a few ways:

• Trying to set a goal is depressing
• Getting off track of your goal is depressing
• Having to push away your goal date is depressing

Realizing this caused the solution to emerge somewhat organically. The math would be much more complicated, but I decided that I can safely assume that if a user chose to use this tool that he or she wanted to lose weight. Without the goal weights, the App struck a chord in its simplicity. I was able to develop a tool that had a single input and could suggest a clear course of action.

You might be thinking that suggesting a clear course of action is just guesswork. When I started out, I had felt the same way. But my earlier decision to assume the user is trying to lose weight allows for some math that creates some very clear separation between the four states that I eventually adopted: Relax, Over, Under, and Gaining.

In terms of programming, the rest of the story is pretty boring. I decided to add a maintenance mode and came up with some more fun math for that, I made it pretty, I tweaked the code so that it acted as you would expect after Thanksgiving weekend, for example, and any other situations that can lead to odd weight fluctuations.

But back to The Overfed Head. One of the central ideas of the book is expressed in the term thintuition, coined by the author to explain the behavior that naturally thin people exhibit. Basically, some people stop and listen to their body to determine whether they're full or hungry, and lots of us don't. At this point, the application was almost done and running on my iPhone. I had been using it regularly and was beginning to notice how it was affecting me. By having a simple, clear explanation of what my body was doing, I couldn't make excuses for the decisions I had made. If I got feedback explaining that my weight was above what was expected, I usually knew why and it was typically related to my behavior the day before. Almost without thinking, I would eat less, giving myself a smaller serving of something, or not finishing food I wasn't hungry for. It wasn't until I was helping to write the text for the iTunes Store that I realized that the application was giving me that thintuition I had read about in The Overfed Head.

I'm really happy with the final product, which is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch in the iTunes Store for 99 cents. The ideas and contributions of a collection of people helped me hone my product and actually simplify it the more of them I used. Stop by the Lite Weight App Site to check out videos of our iPhone weight loss tracking app.

I started an RSS feed (because not enough blogs have a subscription feature, boo). And I added OneBahamas.

So, somebody do something exciting.

P.s. I've leveled up to wife now, too. It's pretty dang awesome. That and Super Smash Brothers on the Wii.

Perhaps you are browsing the internet with a type of direction or a goal. Well why not try it passively? with no PMOG the passive multiplayer online game. I am trying the beta but not got a full impression yet. www.pmog.com

"Only emo's care about what other emo's look like."

how to keep you cool when performaning live 

enjoy

EDIT: I haven't updated in forever, so to make it up, I am linking THREE completed galleries with stories throughout them! The first is the wedding of one Camille Ann Samms and one Jared Anthony Davis, and the second is me climbing Mt. Fuji just 2 days ago, and last my trip to Hakone after coming down Mt Fuji!! Still lots left to go though! I haven't finished the reception of said wedding, plus tons of other thing I took pictures of. Oh! Also on Monday I start my new job in Fujisawa as and Assistant Language Teacher with Interac at 3 real life Japanese Junior High Schools! According to the schedule I got today from one of my schools, my name is "Mr Demon Bizzel." So that'll be neat. Yeah I moved to Yokohama, so my new address is

1st House SHINSUGITA

ROOM#202

3-5-20 NAKAHARA

ISOGO-KU YOKOHAMA-SHI

235-0036

Just in case.

friend: "hows ur finacee?"

Me:.....

"that statement is odd

"as I am sure I told you she leveled up to my wife"

I was only asking because today i had to help to drag my dog to his finall resting place.... i really dont like touching a dead dog....it feels wrong some how....................................... Oh by the way Sean i heard that a another dog found a new home and now u have three dogs here on Nassau.....still cant get over at how cold and lifeless ONIX was .........the glow of life should of stayed, not fade away like that....... we were all so used to the rotweiler waaaaaaah...........................................

Remember when i posted about the algorithm march and the filippinoes prisioner who performed it? Well they've been busy.

Searching you tube for CPDRC Inmates you get a lot more hits. I wonder, with this internet fame if they will be taking request, I would like to see radioheads around the world. ButI wonder how they pick the frontmen and if shiving happens as a result of this.

Alienware no more.......had the laptop fix here on Nassau and it still went and broke and i had it fixed about five times and i am using my dads laptop. that why i been off of skype for a while Sean k.

How expensive exactly?

Well you have to save a life in order to get one.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6941426.stm

huzaah for canada i say, i hope they win this silent war or artic stake. 

One of the things I've been talking/thinking about for a while now is what role absolute truth plays in our lives. I've definitely grown accustomed to thinking more in shades of gray than black and white, while still holding the belief that there are many things that are absolutely true. In that spirit, one of the problems I've been seeing lately is people taking positions on extreme ends of this particular idea, and it's really made me lose a good deal of respect for them.

Here's the situation as I see it. On one end of this belief are people who see that we're becoming more tolerant and accepting of beliefs and ideas. As a reaction, they analyze their own personal beliefs and ideas, and decide that they should be making many of them more rigid, applying the idea of absolute truth to them. On the other end are people who see that we're closing our minds off from differing perspectives. As a reaction, they analyze their own personal beliefs and ideas, and decide they should be making many of them more fluid, even if many of these beliefs don't warrant it.

I got in an argument this last weekend that I probably shouldn't have gotten in. A series of mostly harmless statements ended up in someone telling me, in a tone I took to be extremely patronizing (though I guess some people will never understand that you're an adult), that you should always be early for everything. I don't disagree that in his experience being early has always been beneficial, but in my experience, I've seen people that didn't get hired for jobs because they came to their interview too early. My personal opinion is that you should be right on time.

Disclaimer: Part of the argument was that you can't always be "on time" for everything. An example would be going to the airport to catch a flight. I'm not an idiot, I understand that there are some things that require early attendance. The thing is, if you're "on time" in an extremely nit-picky, technical sense, you're going to miss your plane. So obviously "on time" for a plane, in order to catch that plane, involves adding padding to that time. It's why the airlines explicitly state the duration of time before your flight leaves you should be at the airport. The time your flight leaves, minus this duration, is "on time". If you're in a culture where being 10 minutes early is expected, then your appointment time, minus 10 minutes, is "on time".

Trying to parse this over the last week, one of the only ways I've figured out how to make sense of his viewpoint is how often in the past he's asserted absolute truth about ideas and beliefs that didn't deserve them (for example, that listening to music with a beat makes you want to have sex). I've heard him express distaste about how my generation plays fast and loose with how we think and act. At this point, I view his way of evaluating his beliefs to be on that one end of the extreme, where someone has taken a pretty trivial belief and declared it absolute truth because they're afraid of giving in to the "chaos" that they see in the grey areas.

All that it's done is made me more careful about deciding what I declare to be absolutely true. Congratulations to him if his worry was that I was too lax in my beliefs. He's managed to make me consider making many of my beliefs even less rigid, and he's lost a good deal of respect from me at the same time, all because he wants to believe that you should always be early.

Hey I just wanted to ask if you guys might have any question for the new miss bahamas world as i'm planning to get an interview with her for the site.

so if you are in to gaming sony announced echochrome. As a gamer my favourite genre are puzzle games so i was in told awe by their demo video.

Today the internet revealed to me the origins of echochrome in the form of ole coordinate systems. The difference being, OCS is a level builder and echochrome is the game with levels for you to solve.

That doesn't warrant profit margin but whatever sony. I found the web version and half an hour later I had my first youtube video which is what this post is truly about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEB7zjfRmEM

accompanying videos

 sony's E3 echochrome

 http://www.gametrailers.com/player/21881.html

accompanying play along

windows download

http://tserve01.aid.design.kyushu-u.ac.jp/~fujiki/ole_coordinate_system/index.html 

web version

http://www.nhk.or.jp/digista/blog/works/20070517_fujiki/index.html

note running vista, you have to use IE 7 to make it run. 

Hmmmm it's been a while.  Here are some of the more notable things that have happened since I last posted.  One of my man-to-man kids who is usually very quiet and curt, using "Ok" or "Nothing" to respond to much questions, despite, or perhaps because of, being really smart, burst into the teachers room asking for me, demanding 500 yen.  Apparently there was a Spider man mask in the one of the claw machines.  I had accidentally lent him 100 yen earlier so I guess he thought I was an easy mark.  Anyway, 2 hours later when he had his actual lesson, I decided to do the "Asking to borrow stuff" lesson, and he was downright hyper, asking me in increasing better english to give him money OR go win the mask for him.  Well right before I left for the night he ran back into the teacher's room to proudly display his SPiderman Mask, which was actually cooler than I thought it would be.  An interesting snippet from one of my lessons: I don't think a tortoise can understand the hearts of humans.  That's from a student doing one of the pet lessons, where, in the 'choosing a pet' role play, I often suggest compromises such as keeping a snake and mice, as food, or having a dog's equivalent biomass in hamsters.  Another great quote from a student is "Do you know ninja?".  I actually did a Voice lesson all about ninja, pirates, cowboys, knights and samurai, and explained the antagonism between ninja and pirates in the West, and was given a tutorial in how ninja throw shuriken (apparently held in a face up palm, while the other hand slides forward on top of it and flings it out).  <Can't remember where that full stop goes>.  I got to see the Chubu international airport when I got lost on my way to work at a faraway branch, but it was cool because I rode there in one of the promotional Pokemon trains.  I also got to go to a neat restaurant themed like a prison or horror movie or something, and partway through they cut they lights and guys in masks ran around.  One of them returned the peace sign back to me.  The senior kids language for this month is all about countries, and since most of my kids know I'm from the Bahamas they keep asking where it is but unfortunately the NOVA kids books don't care for the little details so now most of my kids think I live in the ocean.  I found and ate a bunch of stomatopods!(AKA mantis shrimp, thumbsplitters, or, as I always learned back home, snapping shrimp, though apparently that name is already taken,  Just like Sea Cow is already taken for what other people call Sea Hares (I still call them sea Cows).  Spinier than the ones back home though.  Got to see a Dali exhibit at a museum here.  Oh for a potential new kid student, the staff told me before the demo that she 'prefers women teachers,' and that I was 'the best choice' or something.  SPeaking of the staff, they have a new catch phrase, "Come on baby!" which they actually picked up from a kinder student who suddenly said it while motioning during someone's class.  SO now all the teachers are gradually teaching them new lines to accompnay it, such as "You have beautiful eyes," "You're not like other guys," and from me, "I like long walks on the beach."  Not sure if they know what they're saying though.  Now that I finally started swimming, my first time in the steam room another guy who was swimming decided for a conversation opener to ask me if I knew about a back problem he had "DO you know, herniated...uhh..." "Discs?"  "Oh yes!".   SO we had a lot in common there.  ANyway, hopefully I can put some more pictures up soon. 

I have added the first half of pictures from my latest trip to Osaka!  Here!