What Have you "Tweetened" Today?

One of the comments last week asked that I please post some things that are positive and so for this entire week, I'm going to try to find things I can be positive about.

First off is the highest tech food diary I've ever come across, but for those of you net-savvy enough to try to tame it, I think it's probably the best I've seen.

It's called, "Tweet What you Eat" and it involves utilizing a service called Twitter.

Twitter is a service that allows specified friends to stay in touch via instant messenger and cell phone text messaging and Tweet What you Eat involves harnessing this capacity with a make believe private friend you'll know as Twye.

Once mastered, Tweet What you Eat will allow you to keep an itemized food diary on the fly using your cell phone and/or instant messenger service. Not only will it keep track of what you're eating, but due to the nature of Twitter, it'll keep track of the times you eat too (assuming you Twitter as you eat in real time) and in my mind the best feature of all, it'll allow you to set up reminders that'll get sent to your cell phone or instant messenger - something that may be extremely helpful in ensuring you don't miss any meals or snacks.

Tweet What You Eat has also begun to harness the power of social networking by creating what's likely the internet's first crowd sourced calorie database which can be utilized to automatically track your food's calories.

Also amazing is the fact that once you've entered Calories for your own food, enter that food again and the calories will appear automatically. If you're a creature of habit and eat things like the same breakfasts and lunches day in and out, you can have your own B1, B2, L1, L2 shortforms that'll be remembered as well.

Tweet What you Eat is a great addition to the online food diary world - I only wish Twitter were more intuitive for those of us who are no longer teenagers or techies.

To start keeping track of what you've Tweeten, first you'll have to set up a free Twitter account (click here) and once that's done, a free Tweet What You Eat account (click here).

Anyone out there using this service?

[Hat tip to loyal blog reader Ruth]

Google Pedometer

So I'm in Toronto this weekend and the batteries die in my Nike +ipod Sport kit and I forgot my pedometer and I want to know how far my run was.

I could jump in my car and drive out the route, or I could use Google Pedometer.

Called Gmap Pedometer it's a mashup of Google maps that allows you to measure any route you'd like.

Simply zoom into whereever you'd like to map, double click on your starting point and all points in between and Gmap Pedometer will work out your distance.

Yesterday it told me I'm slow.

It's not the most beautiful interface, but for its ease of use and its high degree of functionality I give gmap pedometer an A.

Oh and by the way, there's no right number of steps you should take in a day. All this ridiculousness about 10,000 - fact is the best goal step wise is to take as many as you can enjoy, because if you try to take more steps than you enjoy, you'll stop taking them altogether.

A Healthy Search Engine

The internet is a scary place to research your medical information. Anybody and his brother can make a very credible looking website to provide medical "information" and unfortunately much of the time, that information is woefully inaccurate. At times it may even be dangerous.

Thankfully, the folks who brought us Quackwatch have put together their own peer-reviewed medical search engine - The Internet Health Pilot. It searches only through evidence-based medical information and therefore provides only safe, reliable and informative results.