After my first kid was born I came to the realization that something very important had happened to me and it would change me forever – I got fat.
Now I’m a logic minded person, I realized I had gotten larger by eating more than I was burning off in my day to day life. So I began looking at ways to tackle this problem and found that most of the weight loss sites/apps out there were not for me. The constant ads, the cluttered interface, the hassle of dealing with all the interactivity just made me want to eat more. So I did what any sane individual would do – I reinvented the wheel.
In my mind it was little more then burn more than you consume and you will lose weight – basic math. So I spent some time researching how to calculate ones daily caloric intake based on a users Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) and applied Metabolic Equivalent (MET) to a database of exercises. I then added in a quick section to input calories consumed (reported by the user and stored in a database for easy reuse) and displayed a simple “how many calories consumed, how many to lose a pound a week, and how many to maintain current weight”.
Realizing that results aren’t instant, I threw together a tracking section that would allow you to monitor the last 90 days of progress so that you could see your trend and maybe help find the bad stretches. My wife wanted to join in on the fun and so I created a Buddy system on the tracking page to allow you to see how you and another user were doing.
This allowed a simple, no nonsense means for me to input calories and get a decent feel on how I was consuming food throughout a day/month/year and allowed me to make changes to reduce my weight. 50 lbs lighter, I would call it a success.
Now I am thinking I should release this app out into the wild, but I believe some much needed refactoring and refining will be required before I actually do that.
