Christmas Recovery Web 2.0 Style
Duncan Riley
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Christmas is often a time of gluttony for many. From a traditional roast through to too much alcohol, many will be suffering long Christmas hangovers, particularly those not fortunate enough to live in a country with a gazetted post Christmas recovery public holiday (Boxing Day on Wikipedia here).
Even if you do have December 26 off, with January 1 around the corner it’s time for resolutions about getting fit and healthy. Here’s a few sites we’ve reviewed that will help you along the way.
Fat Secret
(review: April 2007)
Fat Secret is designed to help overweight people leverage a network of friends and online resources to lose weight by building a support network around you to monitor your progress.
Users first state their current and goal weights, and are urged to report in daily with their updated weight. This data builds a graph that is included on their profile page showing progress over time. Each user is also provided with a blog/journal and can add other Fatsecret users as friends.
DietTV
(previously Diet Television: review November 2006)
The site is a directory of diet plans that combines user ratings and professional nutritionist analysis of various factors like ease of implementation, speed of weight loss and allowable alcohol consumption. The company says it is based on two ideas: that dieting is hard and that community is one of the biggest factors in successful weight loss. There was information available on 47 different diets when we first reviewed the site. To search for a diet, users move 12 sliders to indicate which diet and food factors are most important to them. The site recommends which ones could best fit their needs. Users can also contribute off-site links related to any diet.
Traineo
(review December 2006)
Traineo is a health and fitness support site where users report their weight, diet, and exercise daily to a group of friends who help monitor and support one another….Instead of inputting how many ounces of cheese you ate in your burrito, and how much cream you put in your coffee, Traineo allows you to just give an estimation of how you think you ate each day. Based on your age, weight, and goal, it tells you how many calories you should aim for and, at the end of the day, you tell the program if you ate poor, average, fair, or great.
If you’ve spent Christmas alone, or you need some more rounded/ broader help, here’s a few sites that may help as well:
Wellsphere
(review January 2007)
Wellsphere is concerned with day-to-day sorts of health choices that make up “wellness”, the kind you don’t ask your doctor, but consult your peers about. Wellsphere is meant to help people with these choices and motivation by providing users with access to similar people and to health-related resources in their area. These resources are split between personal profiles and databases of health-related locations they’ve put together.
DailyStrength
(review November 2006)
A social network that provides a space for people with a wide variety of medical, psychological and life conditions to discuss their struggles and the treatments they are undergoing.
The highlight of DailyStrength is that users are asked to describe medical and psychological treatments they have undergone. They indicate what conditions those treatments were for, whether they were effective and provide a narrative about the experience. That information is then aggregated by condition and treatment - so it’s easy to see what a large number of people have done in response to a condition or what it’s really like to undergo a certain treatment.
December 26th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
December 27th, 2007 at 2:08 am
March 25th, 2008 at 8:06 pm