The Twitter Diet
Twitter forces you to say whatever you plan to say in 140 characters or less. That's not much room. It's like a diet for verbose writers.
(The above paragraph can be twitted with just 3 characters to spare.)
That got me to thinking about diets in general, and how I have a hard time keeping track of what it is I actually eat and when. So... Twitter to the rescue. Starting Monday I'll be twitting (or is it "tweeting?") my meals, my gym trips, and my daily weight and body fat (as measured by the scale in my bathroom.) I'm going to try it for at least a week, and we'll see how it goes.
If you're following my tweets (www.twitter.com/howardtayler) then I expect this will get quite boring for you. It'll probably be boring for me, too. This is an experiment, and experiments often are.
In the past I've found that the most effective diets for me are those which cut simple carbs to below 30g per day. I'll be trying to eat the same way this time. From a scientific method perspective, since I lack a true control group, the easiest way to test something's effectiveness is to only change one variable at a time. The variable here is "reporting." I'm testing Twitter, not low-carbing. I already know low-carbing works.
For the record, this is not an invitation for any of you to start offering me diet advice. If even one reader out of a thousand decides to email me with suggestions, I'll be buried in unsolicited advice on weight loss (read: SPAM.) If you're an MD, a PA, or an RN, I ESPECIALLY encourage you to not send me advice. If I want it, I'll pay you for it.
Okay, let the tweeting begin (in about 15 hours.)