Introducing... WeightedDown.co.uk

Published August 30, 2011

I recently launched Weighted Down and I wanted to take a little time to explain the what and why.

Weighted Down

For the last 8 years or so I've had a problem with my weight. To begin with I put it on at an astronomical rate, and ever since then it's been steadily climbing. Any weight loss routine I started ended up back firing, with me putting on more weight that I lost. At my worst, I put on 7 stone in less than two years.

The most sustained period of weight loss was when I wrote a quick and dirty site that I could use to log how many calories I was eating, how many of my 5-a-day I was getting, and what my daily weight loss was.

simple weight

It was a quick and dirty app, but for a while there I was seeing some great success with it. However, I fell into my old trap of "rewarding" myself for being so good - and before you know it, I was rewarding myself more often than I was having good days. After a while I simply lost the enthusiasm for it, my confidence was shot… and I was back to square one.

Here we go again

I'd been planning on rebuilding the app from scratch, allowing it to have more than one user. That way I could maybe build in a social element too. Certainly I could then give each user an optional public profile, so if they want they can share their progress with friends. I'd tried using sites like myfitnesspal which track foods, along with calories - but it was taking too long to input what I was eating, and I found myself sticking to foods that were in it's database - feeling guilty if it wasn't.

I wanted my site to allow you to simply guess. Over time you become quite attuned to how many calories are in any given food, and I figured that'd be good enough. For my, the secret to weight loss is not simply in how many calories, but just being aware of how much food I'm eating. When to say no.

Leeds Hack

Leeds Hack is a 24 hour event where a group of developers and designers get together in a room, split into teams of 1-4 people, and build something from scratch. There are often competitions to build something using the Sponsors API's, but I already knew what I wanted to build… and I finally had a name too… Weighted Down.

After the initial 24 hours I had the first version of the site. I've made a few tweaks since then, and I'll continue to do so, but the basic food diary and weight tracking functionality is already there.

Spoilers

I thought I'd give you a sneak peak into some of the features that I'm hoping will make it to the site in the next few weeks. I'm making no promises at this site, but these are currently in the roadmap.

I'd love to hear your feedback, which you can send to rob@weighteddown.co.uk