Using Twitter To Log Fitness and Wellness Trends

There are only three main things to do to achieve awesome finess:

1. Eat well
2. Exercise hard
3. Rest plenty

I don’t do any of those with much proficiency these days. However, I have plans to improve. However, my challenge is always getting into the flow of things. I like numbers and metrics and recently I started using Twitter on my iPhone (Tweetie app) to record what I eat.

The records have been hodge-podge with random tags like, #breakfast, #lunch, #snack, etc. This method doesn’t suit the goal of running these through a program to generate some useful trend data. So I sat down tonight and hashed out (pun intended, you’ll get it) a standardized system of tags to keep track of specific metrics in my fitness and wellness.

The system has to simple and quick otherwise it will be too tedious to use. For those that don’t know, tags start with a hash (#) symbol. This is a practice that many people have begun to adopting on Twitter so I’m going with the flow.

Here are the tags:

1. #exc or #exercise, to mark the update describing an exercise session.
2. #eat, #eat+, #eat-. Records something I ate, the +,- symbols record the rating. For example pizza would be #eat–. This is better than #lunch, #dinner, etc. since it will allow recording things like snacks, drinks, randoms, etc.
3. #rest, #rest+,#rest-. I have a hard time getting to sleep, so this records how rested I am. A little subjective, but #rest++ would be me feeling fully completely energized and rested. #rest– would be like 3 hours of sleep, feel tired and need coffee!
4. #stretch. Marks that you stretched your muscles. I think this is an important one.
5. #18:48, #9:30p, #8:30a, etc. These record time. This is a dynamic set of tags that accepts either the 24-hour format or the 12-hour clock format. The 12-hour format requires a  “p” or “a” at the end. Using this overrides the tweet’s timestamp, which is used by default.
6. #w189lbs, #w83kg. This is to record weight. In this format: #w{weight}{units}. The {unit} can either be “lb” or “kg”.
7. #bf18, #bf15.5, #bf14.7. This is to record body fat percentages. Decimals are ok to record parts.
8. #emo,#emo+,#emo-. For tracking emotional state. A real awesome day would be #emo++, a real shitty day would be #emo—. Can be tweeted like this: “Wow, I had such an #emo+ experience today!” … or … “When it rains it pours. Had such an #emo—- day today. *weeps*“
9. The +/- modifiers: These are for ratings. Add as many to the end as you want, but don’t go too nuts. I recommend using more more than 5. Using it in a tweet: Ate a whole large deep dish meat lovers pizza for dinner by myself at #18:30. #eat—-, I feel so #emo—– about it.

That is a pretty good set of tags that are very easy to remember. Here are some sample tweets:

#eat– #7:30p spaghetti and a salad. glass of milk. http:// twitpic.com/12nw3

#eat+ #8:00a spinach salad with egg and avocado

#rest—-  couldn’t sleep a wink, still have to go to work! *shit* #emo—–

Just won the lottery! #emo++++++++++ see ya in Hawaii!!

So very easy to keep track of things. Of course, you’re not limited to my hash tags. You can use / create your own, for example:

Going to #sleep now!

Creating your own tags is no problem since additional functionality can be coded to handle them at a later point. Pretty soon I’ll write a public parser that generates some pretty graphs for these so you can run your timeline through it and get a trend analysis of how you are doing.

Comments welcome!