Christmas and New Year have always represented a big challenge for me: how to work out my weight and manage the great family lunches and dinners. In a few words, how can I survive these festivities without being marooned by Summer (swimming time)? Then, I questioned myself and my stomach asking it whether it would appreciate some technological helps to keep fit, if I could take part in the seemingly eternal cycle of starting and failing a diet. Frankly speaking, my stomach answered me by growling, but I succeeded in getting a tipoff for experimenting these Internet-based services.
The first link I suggest is textWeight, a simple way to track your weight and see your progress. textWeight will send you a text message in the morning: you reply with your weight. At this point, it is possible to “Login” to the site anytime to see a graph of your weight and verify all the related trends. In this sense, textWeight serves as a reminder telephone-based.
Skinnyo presents a similar approach to the service mentioned above. With Skinnyo we click on “create a challenge” tab at the top of the page and decide if it will remain “private” or “public”. To some extent, starting and a diet is a real challenge, both psychological and physical, and keeping on with it much more… It is interesting to note that the way Skinnyo calculates challenge winners is by the total weight lost during the challenge, and NOT by your overall weight at the end of the challenge.
Another service is pretty similar to Skinnyo but this time the ‘challenge’ is organized in a more ‘medical way’. In other words, MyFitnessPal is a diet and fitness community built with one purpose in mind: providing you with the tools and support you need to achieve your weight loss goals. MyFitnessPal is a real community, includes counting calories, giving examples of possible physical exercises to do, sharing information about food and their annexes, and so on. MyFitnessPal let us MyFitnessPal account from our mobile phone (both iPhone or Android) to use the Recipe Calculator to determine the nutritional contents of any recipe, to calculate the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), or to estimate our Body Mass Index (BMI) and determine our optimal weight range. Last, but not least, it is possible to report about blood circulation, heart beats, etc.
Of course, no Web-based service or tool can replace a thorough visit by the doctor…
In Italiano:
Il nuovo anno porta sempre buoni propositi, buone intenzioni (che regolarmente non si riesce a osservare o a rispettare). Come possiamo sopravvivere alle lunghe e gustose mangiate delle festività natalizie e potere rimanere in salute, senza per forza rinunciare al piacere della convivialità e della buona tavola? Ho chiesto alla mia pancia, timoroso che potessi ricevere una rispostaccia, visto il problema. Eppure, sono riuscito a ottenere il “via libera” per testare qualche servizio della Rete per chi vuol tenere sotto controllo il proprio peso e salute. Tengo a precisare che nessun servizio Web può sostituire la visita presso il nutrizionista dietologo, quindi è sempre bene prendere i suggerimenti sopra proposti col beneficio d’inventario.
In sintesi, possiamo suddividere i siti Internet a secondo del servizio:
1) Siti “conta-calorie”: textWeight (con tanto di agenda che vi ricorda il peso attraverso un sms) o Skinnyo (che pone la questione in termini di “sfida”, in inglese “challenge”), da condividere oppure no;
2) Siti più completi: MyFitnessPal si configura come un servizio polivalente, nel senso che è una vera e propria comunità di persone che raccontano i propri cibi, le calorie, le diete, ecc. Qui sono presenti anche elementi più propriamente medici, come per esempio il calcolo della massa corporea, del meccanismo metabolico, della circolazione sanguigna, ecc.
Didattica col Web 2.0 