Traineo and My Diet

Having to workout isn’t too bad. But having to diet sucks. Having to manage the diet sucks even more. Was today’s diet great, or worse than mediocre? How many pounds did you lose yesterday, today or last week? Well, Traineo - a Web 2.0-style online diet and workout management platform (they call themselves a community though) - aims to help you, or rather me, with that issue.

Feature-wise, it has everything you might expect. An intuitive and user-friendly interface, which makes it easy to enter and organise the “results” of your day. The ability to share your goals and stats with other Traineo users. Diet and workout-based help articles written by experts. And the most innovative of them all: The capability to assign up to 4 “motivators” - people who can not only view your progress with your diet, but also send you encouraging messages to spur you on.

You might think that having two separate tabs for your diet and workout might make filling in your daily tally time consuming, but I found that it barely took me one minute to get everything down. For the most part, this is facilitated by their workout wizard, where all you need to enter is the type of exercise you did (e.g. badminton, football, jogging), how long you did it, and the intensity of the workout. The number of kilo-calories (kcal) lost is automatically calculated.

But as usual, nothing’s perfect. For one, I’d prefer being able to manually enter the number of kcals lost easily since cardio-training machines at most, if not all, gyms already have in-built kcal indicators. Secondly, the default slider for kcals consumed during the day is clearly set for Westerners since the suggested daily intake is set at 1810 kcals! Last and perhaps least is their AJAX-ified signup page. Traineo could take a page from 37signals book here and make it easy for users to know if they successfully pressed the Sign Up button since there happens to be no on-click action for it.

Anyway, I’ve to admit it’s an interesting and useful spin-off from the various Web 2.0-ish community networks spawning out of nowhere these days. So, I think I’ll continue using it for a while. Here’s my personal Traineo page. I’ve resetted it though (by creating a new account), so it should show a clean slate. Bleh, 74.5kg. Another 9.5kg to go…