How fat I am. Let me show you.

September 19, 2008 8:14 AM

Can you suggest an online weight tracker that meets my requirements?

I have a blog in which I examine, in annoying detail, my attempts to change my life. A big part of that is another try at changing my diet, going to the gym, losing weight, etc, and a key aspect of all of it, for me, is the accountability that comes from sharing the info with other people.

I would very much like to include a weight loss graph on the page, but I'm having trouble finding one that really fits my requirements. I currently have a 'ticker' which shows 9lbs down, 210lbs to go sort of information, but that's not really what I want.

Here's what I do want, with some semblance of priority:

Must haves:
-- A graphic presentation that can be embedded into my blog. My blog is a wordpress blog hosted on wordpress.com, which means I can not add much in the way of special code and widgets to it. The 'ticker' I currently have is an image file hosted and updated offsite that I can readily link to. Many similar tickers, and also most of the graphs I've seen are javascript that makes a call to the originating site, and that doesn't work with my blog. (Alternate viable answers: tell me how to make a javascript call from the sidebar of a wordpress blog.)

-- Shows recent weigh-ins as points on a graph, rather than just a description of overall weight loss / gain.

-- It not be a one time thing, but automatically updates as I weigh in on the originating site.

Very nice to haves:

-- Also includes a "hacker's diet"-esque weighted average curve.
-- The graph be appropriately formatted (narrow, vertical) to fit the sidebar of my blog.
-- It be free or very inexpensive.
-- It allows people to select more than one view of the data (ie, shows last 30 days of weigh ins by default, but clicking through to the host site, people can see weigh ins since I started, or weigh ins for the past week, or similar)

Sorta nice to haves:
-- Customizable colours so I can make it look purty on my site.
-- Customizable defaults so I can decide if I want it to show 30, 7, 365, etc days in the default view.

For those familiar with it, the Joe's Goals goal tracker, it has all my must-haves and all but one of my very-nice-to-haves. It's not a weight tracker (though I've thought up an interesting way to bastardize it into become one should I not find anything else that meets my needs) so I'd like something that's oriented to what I really want.

I don't need calorie/nutrition tracking, as I have that covered, but if the tool you suggest is part of a larger calorie/nutrition tracking site, that's fine as long as I can use just the weight chart part.

posted by jacquilynne to health & fitness (6 answers total)

I can't remember what their goal tracking interface is like, but maybe sparkpeople? I could be wrong but I keep thinking they have some progress tracking stuff in there.
posted by miss lynnster at 8:23 AM on September 19, 2008

I did test sparkpeople as part of my calorie tracker comparison project and I didn't find any widgets / tickers for offsite display as part of their toolset, unfortunately.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:31 AM on September 19, 2008

This isn't an elegant suggestion, but you could always chart exactly what you want in excel or google docs. Just save the image of the graph and post that. It would eliminate your last "very nice to have" (unless you're into to quite a bit of manual maintenance).

Good luck in your efforts toward positive changes. You rock!
posted by 26.2 at 9:05 AM on September 19, 2008

I did just this earlier this year. My main requirements were: 1) free and 2) easy to maintain. I did what 26.2 suggested and used google docs. I used to have a dedicated page, but have since taken it down. You can get a taste here. I also tracked calorie source.

Its not very customizable beyond size and rudimentary layout, but the graphs update and publish automatically which satisfied my requirements. Inelegant, indeed.

Perhaps I should start that up again. What would be *really* awesome is a body weight scale and food weight scale that talked to the computer.
posted by GPF at 11:29 AM on September 19, 2008

Unfortunately, that's a script call, which won't work from my WordPress blog.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:09 PM on September 19, 2008

Coming late to this thread, but have you tried physicsdiet.com?

It's got the graph, the "hacker's diet"-esque weighted average curve (I wish every weight tracking graph had this, as it really is all you should look at) and I think you can embed the graphs with a simple iframe or something, presuming you having your Public Weight Loss profile turned on (I think it's off by default)
posted by dyslexictraveler at 10:31 AM on June 22, 2009