It seems that food tracking can have an enormous impact on weight loss and weight control, but counting calories can be difficult. David Sweet was looking to lose weight and wanted to use a system that kept him engaged for a long period of time. He devised a unique system to track his food – the Fist-Sized Volume. Watch this interesting talk, filmed at the New York QS Meetup, to learn how he did it and what he learned (stick around for the great Q&A).
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Nice talk. I read in two lines of reasoning: 1) tracking habits with an app should be made easy or else we stop doing it, and the easiest seems to be something really “handy” like measuring things with fist (food volume), 2) you were interested in a topic, did research (not sure how done), found out the main control point (eat less calories) and argue that stats give you averages and we’re all unique so even a potentially biased way ot measuring (your fist) still provides data that are important enough.
One question: how and when do you track your fist count (also an app?)
The iPhone App, called Pertinacity,
is now available in the App Store.
Thanks for the comment.
Your statement in (1) is spot on. That’s what I was getting at.
My only change to (2) would be that the biases are counteracted by the moving average. You could work with calorie estimates or fist-sized volumes and either way you could counteract the biases by taking a moving average and using that as your upper limit of next-day consumption.
I track fist-sized volumes instead of calories because they are significantly simpler to calculate. They seem to be correlated enough to calories to be used as the basis for a weight-loss strategy.
I have notes and references for the research I did in the slides from the talk.
I started out tracking my fist count in the Notes app on my iPhone during the day and transcribing the daily number to a spreadsheet which both computed the moving average and prescribed the next-day consumption limit. I have since ported all of that to an iPhone app that I use regularly.
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