Probably the biggest stumbling block on my path to losing weight has been a lack of motivation. I love food, and I’ve always felt that life is for living and doing what you love. Well, turns out that can be an excuse to engage in destructive behavior, such as over eating. Anyway, a couple of things finally motivated me to make some real changes in my life, and once I decided to change, I sought out some help to keep me going and hold me accountable.

My motivation for losing weight is two-fold. First, I just turned 30. Now, I’m not saying I’m having a mid-life crisis or anything, but let’s just say I’m starting to feel Father Time nipping at my heels a bit. Second, in the process of moving into our new house last December, I hurt my lower back pretty badly lifting boxes. I spent a couple of excruciating nights during which the 15-foot walk to the bathroom brought me to tears from the pain. Laying in bed in constant pain, I promised myself that when my back healed and I was mobile enough to start working out, I would once and for all get myself in shape. It took almost a month before I felt strong enough to start, but I did start. And I plan to finish.

So, I had my motivation in place. But I’d been motivated before. When I was 25, I dropped about 20 pounds and actually had myself in pretty good shape. I marked my progress on the wall calendar in my living room, and seeing how much work I’d done really kept me going. Problem was, when I turned the page of the calendar to the next month, all of a sudden, I hadn’t done anything. The calendar was blank, and it was literally like a switch flipped off. I stopped working out. To avoid that happening again, I needed to be held accountable by a system that wouldn’t let me just turn the page.

And that’s when I started One Thing New. Even though it took me a couple of weeks to get to my first Lose Weight with Web 2.0 post, I had planned from the beginning that I would write about that. My thinking was if I publish my intentions to lose weight, then I’m accountable to my readers. And if I framed it as a project (testing out and comparing two Web 2.0 weight loss sights), then I would have a tangible goal to shoot for. Pretty smart, huh?

As I wrote in yesterday’s post, Gimme20 became my favorite of the two Web apps I reviewed. Tracking my workout — I mentioned using a calendar the last time I tried losing weight — and seeing my progress grow over time is incredibly inspirational. You want to keep it growing. Well, you can’t turn the page on Gimme20’s tracking page, and I think that’s important. And it’s not only the fact that I can see my stats growing; it’s also the fact that everyone can see them, too. If I put my goals out there, I’m held accountable by the people who read about them. It’s very motivating.

I can say that I wouldn’t have gotten as far a long as I have without the help of the Web 2.0 technology I’ve used. My age and my injury motivated me. And the potential audience and viewers of my blog and my Gimme20 page have helped me stick to my plan. I’ll continue to track my progress on Gimme20, and I’ll probably post periodic updates here. But I think I’ve gotten over the hump. My commitment to change is finally real, and I plan to see it through — with your help.

Oh yeah, since I started my program on Feb 28th, I’ve lost 12 pounds. Not bad for a month’s work, eh?

As my faithful readers know, about a month ago I did a preliminary review of two health and fitness Web sites that offered some innovative apps for keeping track of your weight loss progress. The two sites are Traineo and Gimme20, and I used both of them to help me get started on a program to lose weight. This is part one of a two-part follow up to my initial story. Tonight’s post will focus on the Web sites, and tomorrow I’ll write more about my personal experience. On to the results!

When I started out, my intention was to use Traineo to track my diet and my weight and Gimme20 to track my workout. I set up my accounts and got started.

INTERFACE
Traineo’s interface is very well done. They incorporate AJAX elements seamlessly into their pages. I never got the feeling that I was lost, and all of the interactivity enhanced the site rather than getting in the way. The graphics are typical Web 2.0 (shiny reflections and big, bold fonts). Overall, Traineo hits it out of the park with their user interface.

Gimme20 has a more traditional interface without as much AJAX slickness. They still have the look of Web 2.0, though, with their vibrant colors and big fonts. And their “Build a Workout” feature benefits from the AJAX treatment.

My one complaint about Gimme20 is that I had a hard time finding my personalized homepage where I could update my progress. On Traineo, once you sign in, there’s a big, green button on traineo.com that takes you to your personal page. On Gimme20, you either have to scroll down, click a link to your personal page, and click the “My Fitness” tab or click on a small text link in the upper right-hand corner (”My Workouts”).

First of all, My Fitness and My Workouts take you to the same page: they should be named the same thing. Second, the default tab for your personal page on Gimme20 is “profile” where you see information about yourself like homepage and blog posts you’ve written. The default tab should be the fitness tab so it’s easier to update your progress.

I guess that’s a fairly minor quibble, but I think it’s significant.

CONTENT
Traineo’s approach is a survey of fitness, meaning they offer a little bit of everything fitness-related. They don’t dig deep in any one area like Gimme20 does with exercise. In fact, this is Traineo’s biggest failing. Tracking your workout consists of choosing from a preset list of activities, noting how long you engaged in that activity, and selecting from four levels of difficulty. Not a very scientific approach, and as far as I can tell, you can’t customize any of it.

Tracking your diet consists of rating your diet from “poor” to “great” and entering your total daily calories. The calorie bit is helpful, but I could have benefited a great deal from some sort of calorie counting app that would let me enter what I’ve eaten and calculate the calories for me. As it stands, Traineo offers a link to the USDA nutrient database, which is cumbersome and has a useless search function. They could do much better themselves.

One thing that Traineo gets right is their offering original articles in the “Library” section. They have some really good articles about exercise, eating right, and what appears to be a dead link for articles about motivation (not very motivating if it doesn’t work!). Gimme20 could really benefit from a similar feature. Adding opinions from “experts” would give their site some extra gravitas.

Both Traineo and Gimme20 have large communities of users, but I didn’t really have the time to actively engage in either one. Gimme20 seems to have more features built in to their community, but that’s just my observation in a quick look around.

Gimme20 lacks the diversity of Traineo, but what it lacks in diversity, it makes up for in targeted content. Specifically, Gimme20 focuses almost exclusively on the exercise aspect of losing weight. And they do it very well. Users can add exercises to a list from which they or other users can create custom workouts. These workouts can be tracked pretty much however you want: reps, durations, weight, etc. Users can either create their own workouts or subscribe to pre-fab workouts created by other users. It’s an innovative way to approach working out.

Overall, I liked Gimme20’s content better. I think it’s more important to do one thing really well than to do a lot of things halfway, and Gimme20’s workout content is vastly superior to anything on Traineo. If Gimme20 added a similar interface for user-created diets and nutrition, they could very well corner the Web market on fitness.

Over the course of the last month, I spent far more time on Gimme20 than I did on Traineo. In the end, I pretty much just used Traineo for its weight tracker, which I liked better than Gimme20’s because it calculates total weight lost instead of weight lost since last weigh in. Neither site is perfect, but I think Gimme20, with it’s depth of content, is a lot closer than Traineo, which is really just a pretty face without much substance.

Check back tomorrow to see how I did with my fitness program, including how much weight I lost.

In the interest of full disclosure, I had a crappy day at work today, and my mind isn’t really in a blogging place right now. But I thought I would share with you several things I’ve been thinking about lately that may or may not end up as full blown posts down the road.

1. Podcast reviews
I’ve been listening to several new podcasts recently, and I’m thinking about offering my thoughts on new and established podcasts. Yesterday, I discovered that Kevin Smith has one, and there are a few others that I’ve followed sporadically that I’ve been thinking about subscribing to again. It’s a really exciting medium that I need to become more familiar with.

2. Blogs about blogging
As I gain more experience as a blogger, I plan to offer some advice and tutorials about the art of blogging. At the moment, I’m far from an expert, but I think my experiences as a fledgling blogger might be of interest. One of the first topics I plan to tackle in this arena is my response to one point that Joshua made in his “9 Lessons for Would-be Bloggers” piece: Everything is beta. His post is still pretty fresh, and I’m going to ponder it for a day or two before I respond.

3. Follow ups
I’ve got several projects in the air right now: losing weight with Web 2.0, Project Opus, redesigning roblindsey.com, and getting my fantasy baseball league started. I’ll be following up all of these with posts in the near future.

4. Linux pre-installed on Dell and HP computers.
I’m a big believer in the open source software movement, and Linux is what started it all. Recently, I installed Ubuntu on my old Windows HP, and I’ve been playing around with it a good bit. I plan to write an article with my opinion of the potential for Linux to be pre-installed on factory computers. I need to do some more research first. So that post will be down the road a ways. Maybe by the time I get around to it Dell or HP will confirm that they’re doing it.

5. St. Patrick’s Day or, as I like to call it, my birthday
As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m turning 30 this year. Though I’m typically a pretty even-keeled guy about stuff like this, I can feel some thoughts about this milestone bubbling in my brain (or maybe I’m just having a stroke!). Nonetheless, I’ll probably forgo my Weekend Web Developer piece on Saturday in favor of a meditation on turning 30.

So there you have a look into the future of One Thing New. I’m pleased with the work I’ve done so far. I realize that the scope and focus of this blog is sometimes nebulous and kind of abstract, but I hope it’s at least been interesting. Thanks to all who have been reading.

If you are a regular here at onethingnew.com, you’ll know that I started a weight loss program a few days ago. Well, I bought a stationary bike yesterday, and the only place in the house to put it is in our bedroom where there is no TV or computer. That means nothing to occupy my mind while I’m riding. So this evening, I’m putting together some iTunes workout mixes so I can listen to my iPod while I ride.

My mixes are going to be longer than five songs, but I think you can get the full workout experience in the mix I’ve got for you tonight. I’m making a rock mix, a hip-hop mix, and an everything mix. Tonight, I give you Top Five Friday’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Workout Mix.

I think that’s a pretty good mini mix for a mini workout. Some folks say you only need to exercise eight minutes in the morning. Well, tonight’s mix is good for two of those! Enjoy, folks.

Click here to open iTunes and download this iMix directly.

The focus of onethingnew.com is to provide a context for technology in the human world. Technology can help us to be productive, to have fun, and to change our lives. Tonight I’ll be exploring the last of those aspects as I set out to change my life with the help of the Web.

My entire life I’ve been overweight. I’ve always known it was a problem, but I haven’t done much to correct it. Now, with my 30^th birthday rapidly approaching, I think it’s time for a change, and with the help of some innovative Web sites, I’m going to try and shape up.

I first got the idea that a Web app could help me lose weight last year when a link to traineo.com made it to the front page of digg. When I visited the site, I found a very inviting user experience.

Very “Web 2.0,” traineo uses bright colors and a ton of Ajax functionality to get you signed up and going. There are big, flashy icons that open trackers for workout, diet, weight, and a custom tracker for whatever you’d like (presets for this field include waist line, body mass index, and happiness). The best feature is probably the “motivators” section in which you can invite close friends or family to monitor your progress, hold you accountable, and support your mission.

To supplement my traineo account, I’ve signed up for gimme20.com, another Web 2.0-style site with flashy graphics and a slick, Ajax-driven interface. Their service is similar to traineo’s, but gimme20 has a narrower focus on the exercise element of losing weight. The killer app of their site is the ability to build a custom workout and share it with the community. You add pre-defined or custom created exercises to your workout, specifying reps, weight, or time, and gimme20 will add the workout to your page and let you track your progress. If you don’t want to spend the time building your own workout, you can choose from hundreds of user-generated workouts on the site.

My plan consists of monitoring my diet and weight on traineo while keeping track of my workout on gimme20. In about a month, I’ll check back with a full report to let you know how I’m doing. I’ve tried losing weight once or twice before, and it’s probably the hardest thing a person can do. It requires discipline, motivation, and the want to change. Hopefully, with the help of some innovative Web technologies, I can finally succeed.