onebahamas.com - do Bahamian stuff, but online blogs

How I Created an iPhone Weight Loss App

neildogg — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:53:09 +0000

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.

RSS

somegirl — Fri, 09 May 2008 04:54:28 +0000

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.

PMOG

Ash Stampede — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 22:10:26 +0000

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

Nerd Quote of the day!

Ash Stampede — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 22:12:44 +0000

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

ben folds on myspace

Ash Stampede — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:35:53 +0000

how to keep you cool when performaning live

enjoy

Mount Fuji

xenon — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 14:39:30 +0000

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.

Nerd quote of the day!

Ash Stampede — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 22:34:17 +0000

friend: "hows ur finacee?"

Me:.....

"that statement is odd

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

Does anyone here believe that there is a after life???

star_saber — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 19:15:25 +0000

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...........................................

I LOVE THE INTERNET!

Ash Stampede — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 19:36:42 +0000

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......

star_saber — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 20:54:01 +0000

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.