The Latest Trend in Dieting
Just last week we read and heard about blogging. While I was at the gym, I picked up the March 2007 copy of O Magazine. Why we have magazines that old is beyond me. Inside is an article called “Losing it on the Web” with an image of a laptop sitting ontop of a scale.
The article starts talking about sisters who started a blog site called 3fatchicks.com. They are considered the first wet loss blog site. One sister started it to post what she ate and how she felt about losing weight for her other sisters to see. They suddenly had an audience. Other dieters started participating and the site grew. The site not only benefited others, but the sisters each lost nearly 100lbs each!
Today the site has more than 60,000 registered users. There are chat rooms and message boards so users can post their own results, downfalls, triumphs, challenges and insight. Here, friendships are established and people can find buddies to support them not only with the weight loss, but in general. Friendships are often established from these types of sites.
A search was done on blog posts for the words ‘diet’ and ‘weight,’ which resulted in more than 100,000 hits.
In fact, better-known diets like Weight Watchers and Pure Weight Loss (formerly LA Weight Loss) are now turning to the web. Members are able to do the entire program from home and interact with other ‘losers.’ Aside from support, members can swap recipes and their personal methods of making it through the program successfully.
Beneficial?
I think it is. I have a friend, I’ll call him Fred because that’s a fun name, who did a program called Medifast. Medifast is a packet’d food diet program where you eat the packets (mix with water) and one regular meal (ex. Chicken & salad). The site is medifast1.com. Once your order has been placed, you are given a free membership to mymedifast.com. This is where you can privately keep track of your meals eaten, exercise (sex counts as exercise!), swap recipes (mix the packets with other packets or other ingredients to make cookies, muffins, waffles, ice cream, etc.), post success pictures, questions about the program, etc. Fred has lost 100lbs in about 6 months and looks and feels great. He’s taken my tips as his friend and a personal trainer…but he’s turned to the message board for his other answers about the diet. He let me search around the site when he started off and I thought what a great program! It seemed the site had many success stories and many thanked each other for the support, saying that the blogging and message boards are what did it for them.
How is he doing now?