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Two months ago, I bought the Withings WIFI scale, which has a bunch of unique features, including the ability to report weigh-ins to twitter. I decided to conduct a two month personal experiment where my scale would report to twitter every time I stepped on it. Because my twitter account is hooked up to Facebook, the scale also updates my Facebook status.

I had two goals for the Twitter diet:
1. Don’t gain any weight in the month of December
2. Lose 10lbs by the end of January

Amazingly, I managed to acheive goal #1, but I fell short of goal #2. I only managed to lose 5lbs during the twitter diet. The Twitter diet was unique because everybody around me was reminded that I was on a diet, which created a built-in weight loss support group. If somebody saw me eating junk food, I would be ridiculed.

The daily reporting of my weight caused me to really think twice about what I was eating. For the first time in my life, I experimented with various diets. I went veggie for a few weeks, I tried the the low-carb thing too. There is no way I would have been motivated to diet if it wasn’t for the Withings scale.

Overall, I think the twitter diet has a lot of potential. I’m actually going to keep the scale sending tweets, but on a weekly basis instead of daily. The weekly reporting should be enough to get me embarrassed if I start to creep back up, and thats the real benefit. The public reporting of weight, gets people who would otherwise not care to really think about how much they weight, what they are eating, and what they are doing.