

Show HN: Project To Help Me Lose Weight - symkat

Hi!  I made http://weightgrapher.com/<p>Essentially, all the websites I've used between FitBit, LoseIT and MyFitnessPal have really poor graphing.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Thoughts?  Feedback?
======
neogodless
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?

~~~
symkat
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.

------
btilly
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.)

------
japhyr
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.

------
ceeK
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.

------
brudgers
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?

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

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

~~~
symkat
<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.

~~~
tgrass
Perfect.

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

~~~
symkat
I'll try that. =)

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

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

------
aoprisan
looks interesting. any plans to open source it?

~~~
symkat
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.

