If tracking your calorie intake is part of your New Year’s resolution and you already use Twitter, create and maintain a food diary using the Twitter-enabled Tweetwhatyoueat service. Here’s how it works: on Twitter, friend the Tweetwhatyoueat bot (named twye) and direct message it your meals and snacks throughout the day from the web, your phone, instant messenger, or your Twitter client of choice. Tweetwhatyoueat creates a food diary based on your direct messages, calculating your calorie totals as you go. (Your food intake isn’t public, so your friends won’t know about those Twinkies.) Being a closet Twitter fan, I love this new way to make the service actually productive. After the jump, check out Tweetwhatyoueat in action.
Here’s what my food diary from this morning looks like:
It took a few tries to get Tweetwhatyoueat to friend me and
start my diary, and it’s also not that smart figuring out how many
calories your food items contain itself. But you can go to your
diary and enter calorie counts by hand at the end of the day, and
armed with a site like
"http://www.lifehacker.com.au/tips/2007/10/10/count_calories_with_acalorieco.html">
aCalorieCounter.com, that’s no big deal. If you know the
calorie count of what you’re eating off the top, you can specify it
in your direct message, i.e., messaging it like so: d twye 1 will enter “1 small orange” into your food
small orange:100
diary, with a calorie count of 100. Overall, Tweetwhatyoueat is a
clever way to put Twitter’s platform to good use.