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.