A Look at Diet Television

Posted on October 22, 2007 3 Comments

Earlier this year I found a nifty Web 2.0′ish web site aimed at fitness and exercise. I signed up and used it to track my workouts for a month or two. Then, as is too often the case, I slowly stopped using it.

Sadly, I can’t even recall the name now! I remember the glossy images and the rounded corners…

I took a bit of a break from the gym for a couple months this summer, but saddled back up in August. Since then, I’m back to going 4 or 5 days a week, but I recently realized I wasn’t seeing the results I’d like to see. I decided to start doing a better job of logging (to hopefully do some analysis) and went looking for a site to help me.

I didn’t find the site I’d used before, but I did find Diet Television (aka diettv), a site aimed at weight loss and exercise. As I’m always game to try new sites, I signed up. Free, of course.

It’s a pleasant enough site to use. Most things work as you’d expect and there’s a very low learning curve to get rolling. There are easy to use guides to help set goals and work out exercise plans that I liked using. There’s also a lot of information on various diet plans — and quite a bit of “social” wrapped around the whole thing.

You also have your tracking areas for sleep, water, mood and (of course) weight to go along with the selected diet plan (optional) and/or food log.

On a whim, I decided to not only log the exercises, but to also log my meals. Talk about a great way to lose weight:

Look at food item.
Debate how long it’d take to search for it in the food database and log it.
Walk away from food item….

I stopped using the food logging bits when I grew frustrated that some of what I eat isn’t in their food database, and there’s no obvious way to add “custom” or missing foods.

However, I just had a nice email exchange with Rebecca (advocate and support manager) this evening and learned that we can email them missing foods and get them added. Nice, that’s very good to know.

Now I have to reconsider the spreadsheet I crafted over the weekend (hell, I lost 8 lbs tracking food for a week. On a whim! Think I’m going to stop tracking just because of a little frustration?).

Only other thing I’d like to see is a way to directly enter the calories burned in a workout. If I burn 650 calories on the cross trainer, it can sometimes get tedious fiddling with the effort/time values at the site to get an end result close to that.

Definitely a site worth looking over if you’re interested in tracking diet and/or exercise. I can’t speak to the social aspects yet — while they’re readily available and in front, I’ve yet to dip my toes in.

Tags: diet, DietTV, exercise, health, social, web2.0