Show HN: Project To Help Me Lose Weight | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Project To Help Me Lose Weight

18 pointssymkat14 comments

Hi! I made http://weightgrapher.com/

Essentially, all the websites I've used between FitBit, LoseIT and MyFitnessPal have really poor graphing.

When I joined weight loss groups and forums I found most people are afraid of getting on the scale just because of how discouraging daily fluctuations can be.

I aimed to fix this problem by bringing exponentially damped averages into the weight graphing, and educating on using your trending weight to see how you're doing instead of the up-and-down of raw numbers.

Thoughts? Feedback?

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The site leaves some unanswered questions in the minds of users that might consider using it.

If this is a free service, how do you plan to subsidize it if it becomes popular? Will your personal data remain private? Might the site stop working at some point without warning? Will you lose your data that you've entered?

Does the site work with other sites where you've tracked your weight, like MyFitnessPal, Nike+, Calorie Count, etc, at least for the purposes of importing data?

Will there be a community element of any kind for supporting each other? Will the site let you connect to other site APIs and export your weight if you log it and track it here?

Those are some great points:

The service is free and all functionality that's currently in it will remain free. I plan to subsidize it through affiliate advertising. Currently the links to the Aria scale are aff links that give me 12% of the sale. I prefer unobtrusive methods such as that, and more so it's a product I use and recommend. I wrote a site around getting the data from it.

The first version supports importing weight data from LoseIT (only premium members of their site can export data), and FitBit (all users work through a pubsub channel and forced syncing if you're into that). MyFitnessPal, and Withings' Scale are both on my todo list.

A community element will be added eventually with forums/friends, but it hasn't been a priority for this initial version. Exporting data also wasn't a priority at this stage, but will become one when people actually want to export data.

I should note that the inspiration for a graph that uses exponentially damped averages to smooth away daily fluctuations was http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/. This site gives an automated way to get that information into a pretty picture with minimal work. Hopefully it will get more people to take advantage of the idea, without having to first read something aimed at engineers.

(For those who are curious as to how I know this, Kate is a friend of mine, and got the idea to do this after I explained how Hacker's Diet works, and why it works better for men than women. Not that I deserve any credit here - my contribution amounts to heckling from the side lines as Kate came up with the ideas and did all of the work.)

This works for exercise as well. When I was on a pushup/pullup kick last year, I made a graph that showed a moving average. It really was motivating to see the steadily trending upward line, in this case.

If you are successful with this app, you might try making a similar project for tracking criteria that someone wants to increase.

As someone who has embarked on losing weight recently, this would definitely come of use. It's quite frustrating to lose a pound here and gain a pound there and not be able to see if you're losing weight overall.

Feedback: I have no interest in signing up before I try it. It's not free - I get enough emails I don't want already.

Plus I'm lazy. Maybe that's why I'm fat?

Seems similar to an Android app called Libra. Do you have a phone app?

Show an example please. Many folks won't sign up to crit a project.

http://www.weightgrapher.com/about Shows an example of the graphs and explanation of the site.

Things not shown: side bar of that page displays your weight, weight this day last week, last month, and a prediction of where you will be one month from now assuming linear extrapolation of weight shifting. Settings pages allow you to import data from LoseIT, link with a FitBit account, etc.

Perfect.

So you capture attention, make sure that's obvious on the landing page: Put a nice big link somewhere "See How it Works!"

I'll try that. =)

I changed the primary hero button to a "See How It Works" that links to the about page.

This is fantastic. You've won a fan already :)

looks interesting. any plans to open source it?

Not at the moment. I did open source the FitBit API I wrote for it: https://github.com/symkat/WebService-FitBit however it's incomplete (I only have API definitions for the calls I actually use). So, while it's open-sourced, it's not of a quality yet I would put on CPAN.

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