Getting Smaller with iPhone #5: RunKeeper

Two weeks ago I talked about using Couch to 5K to start running. I more-or-less finished the program and ran 5K during a workout.

At least, I think I ran 5K. This is an open question because I was tracking my run with Nike+, and got a funny result:

That speed plummet near the end there? That was when I was feeling pretty good, turned on “Fel Del Av Gården,” and really picked up the pace.

That it registered as a significant drop in speed is disappointing to say the least.

My guess is that when I sped up, my stride changed from the one I had calibrated the sensor with. I was moving faster, but my foot must have been in contact with the ground longer [pdf], so Nike+ thought I had slowed down.

Since distance = speed × time, and I no longer trust the speed measurement, how far am I really going? Luckily, government satellites are here to answer the question.

RunKeeper [iTunes] is a free app that uses the GPS capabilities of iPhone 3G and 3GS to track position during a workout. In this way it can measure speed and distance more accurately than Nike+ as well as plot the position data on a map.

Like Nike+, RunKeeper has a website that it syncs workout data to. It’s missing Nike+’s community and challenge features, but I found those mostly useless anyway. Instead, RunKeeper offers several improvements over what you get on Nike+:

• A graph that lets you mouse over to find your speed at any point during the workout. Nike+’s graph only shows numeric speed information at points where you had already pressed the home button.
• An automatically-created map of the route and elevation data along the graph. So shiny!
• Categorizing of activities (such as running and walking). I had to stop using Nike+ during my walks because it would affect my average speed calculation.
• A faster, cleaner interface. It still uses Flash for the graphs, but it’s overall less of a beast than Nike+.

I’ve been running Nike+ and RunKeeper simultaneously and trying to re-calibrate Nike+ based on what the GPS readings have been. Unfortunately, my current pace seems to be on the cusp between two stride lengths, so if I calibrate for going a bit faster, normal speed gets inaccurate and vice-versa.

I’m a bit reluctant to stop using Nike+ for runs, but that may have more to do with my investment in particular shoes and a gadgety sensor than any actual utility I get from the software. Since I don’t take advantage of the social features, there’s little to recommend it.

What Nike+ does currently give me that I’m still taking advantage of is voice prompts for time and distance during the workout (or, at least what Nike+ thinks is the distance), but I could get that by upgrading to RunKeeper Pro [iTunes] for $10.


At free, there’s no reason not to try out RunKeeper, especially if you haven’t gone the Nike+ route or are dissatisfied with it. Make sure you heed the following warning, however:

WARNING: For usability reasons with iPhone typos, RunKeeper will send you your password in the clear via e-mail if you request it. Make sure that you choose a completely unique password when you sign up for RunKeeper.

Also, this tip:

TIP: Take RunKeeper up on its suggestion to disable Wi-Fi during your workouts. This will keep iPhone from being tempted by SkyHook’s hotspot location data and instead rely solely on GPS.


That’s the last of my planned Getting Smaller with iPhone posts. You can see them all at the diet label. I hope you’ve enjoyed them and found them useful.

Have any other iPhone apps that will assist in getting smaller? Leave tips in the comments.

Graveyard Panorama

Taken in Salem, stitched together with Pano. 

(Sent with http://go.blogger.com/ yo!)

Multimedia message

Test for mobile video blogging.

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Taken at tonight's Harvard/Brown game. Brown almost pulled it out, thanks to a great late game drive followed by a successful on-sides kick, but it was not to be.

This is also a test of using go@blogger.com MMS from iPhone. 

Getting Bloggy With iPhone #1: BlogPressLite

Just a quick post to test out the new, free, semi-official iPhone app for Blogger, BlogPressLite [iTunes].


Set up's a bit confusing (bet you didn't know that you already have a PicasaWeb account if you're signed up for Blogger) but it beats Mail-to-Blogger for posting photos. Tip: tap a photo for size and alignment options.

Since the app is a birthday present, I thought I'd post a picture of our cake.

Since this is also a blog, here's a picture of my cat:




Edited from the iPhone version to remove some blank lines, add the iTunes link, and include this message.

Literal Parking Meter Fail

Getting Smaller with iPhone #4: Couch to 5k

In the past few posts, I’ve talked about starting The Hacker’s Diet, counting calories with Lose It!, and graphing my weight with True Weight. Now I’m going to switch over to talking about exercise.

I read Wired’s “Live by the Numbers” article on Nike+ just as I was starting the diet, and, apparently being in a fairly suggestible state, decided to try it out. Exercise is good for periodically burning a chunk of calories (with Lose It! there to ensure that I don’t eat even more to compensate) but better for overall helping me become a healthier person.

I had tried running for a brief time in college, but both individual runs and the entire habit were quickly abandoned. I did learn two important lessons, however:

• Do not just put on a pair of shoes and start running.
• Do not try to match pace with Andrew W.K. songs.

My friend Leah tipped me off to the idea of using a program of gradually-increasing intervals instead. There are a handful of these available, but a fairly popular one seems to be Cool Running’s Couch to 5K. Couch to 5K is a nine week training program, three days a week, the last week of which is 30 minute runs (which, if you’re a bit faster than me, will be five kilometers long).

The first five weeks are 20 minute workouts that alternate between running and walking (3 minute walk, 90 second run, &tc.) in order to build up one’s stamina. Timing these manually can get to be a bit annoying, but, luckily, as they say, there’s an app for that.

Felt Tip, Inc.’s Couch to 5K app [itunes store] is the very one. It has Cool Running’s routine programmed in, and, if you keep it in the foreground as you run (you can lock the screen), it will play audio cues for when you should switch between walking and running and vice-versa. It also times your warm-up and cool-down walks.

I found this app attractive (Why wood? I don’t care. I like it.) and very functional. Owing to limitations in the iPhone platform you must keep it running with music playing and the ringer switch on ring for it to time and play its audio, but I didn’t find that much of an inconvenience. Couch to 5K is nice enough to start exactly where you left off if you accidentally quit it by bringing up a different app.

Since Apple can circumvent its own rules, you can use Couch to 5K along with Nike+. Nike+ will happily operate in the background, so just start it first, then Couch to 5K.

I ran both simultaneously for the first several weeks, but got a bit annoyed at Nike+’s lack of sophistication. Since it has no concept of warm-up or cool-down, you would need to pause it to keep those sections from bringing down your run’s average pace. I just sort of didn’t bother. It was neat to see the intervals graphed out, though. I just wish I could mouse over the graph to get the pace at that point; Nike+’s site is not the numbers-geek paradise Wired claimed.

Now, since I’m in to the constant-running weeks (just started week 9), I don’t use the Couch to 5K app during the run at all. I know a spot that takes me five minutes to walk to, so once I get there I set Nike+ to the week’s duration and take off. The app nicely lets you check off days (with a double-tap) if you complete them outside of the app, so I can still keep track of my progress there.

My thanks to Cool Running for the program, and to Felt Tip, Inc. for the app. They both played their respective parts well and now I can run for 28 minutes at an average pace of 10:30. I’m looking forward to bringing my distances up and my times down over the coming months. Keep tabs on the little Nike+ gadget in my sidebar to see how I’m doing. (By the way, my PowerSong is “Fel Del Av Gården” by Movits!. Watch the video in the post I wrote about them.)

Running’s great, but so’s walking. Nike+ can get confused if you mix them, so that means that there’s another app to talk about next time.

Rachel Efron: Home to Me

“Home to Me” performed by Rachel Efron. From the 4AM CD release party at Café du Nord.

I saw Rachel Efron when she played Jupiter in Berkeley a year or so ago. She has a great mellow jazzy-pop sound and a beautiful voice.

She’s touring in support of her new album, 4AM, and is playing tonight in Cambridge at the Lily Pad.

I’ve found two more videos on YouTube from the 4AM CD release party in SF: “A Fool Could Find a Way” and “Goodnight My Dear” (which is from her first album, Say Goodbye).

Getting Smaller with iPhone #3: True Weight

I mentioned in yesterday’s diet post that Lose It!, while otherwise pretty awesome, does not include the Hacker’s Diet–proscribed moving average graph of your weight. A moving average graph is pretty crucial for smoothing out the inevitable weight fluctuations that you’ll see when weighing yourself every day.

The app I’m using to fill this need is True Weight [app store]. It’s 99¢, though there’s also a lite version with no import / export and limited graph ranges if you really want a risk-free trial.

True Weight is a simple, straightforward app that asks for your weight and then graphs it with a moving average. It also does the math for a few key dieting stats. (In case you’re curious, that’s not my data over there. The image is taken from the official True Weight screenshot page.)

As you can see, the interface is quite pleasant and streamlined.
For the calorie-counter, the “Daily Energy” reading is particularly useful. It takes your calculated weight change over the past seven days and does the 1lb = 3500 calories conversion to tell you how much your daily calorie consumption has been under your daily calorie burning. You can then use this information directly to tweak your budget up or down in Lose It!.

I’ve been quite happy with True Weight and would recommend it as a great compliment to Lose It!, but, as thanks to Benjamin Ragheb for stopping by yesterday’s post to comment, I’ll mention FatWatch as a graphing-and-analysis alternative. Though I haven’t tried it, if you’re just starting this process (or want to take the import process for a spin) you might want to give it a look.

From the tour, FatWatch seems to have more overall features than True Weight, including reporting statistical variance and comparing with a goal line, but it’s comparatively less iPhony-attractive. It’s also $9.99, but Grogmaster Blog readers can take a look at the comments on the last post and maybe get a bit of a deal.

Lose It! and True Weight work well together for calorie counting, but as part of this diet I’ve also tried to get a bit more active. The next post will be about, as they say, getting off the couch.

Getting Smaller with iPhone #2: Lose It!

In my last post I pitched The Hacker’s Diet and shared a bit about my initial, positive results on a calorie counting diet. In this one I’ll talk about Lose It!, the highly-recommended iPhone app that I used for budgeting and actually counting those calories.

(I’d like to thank Daniel Jalkut and Steven Frank for writing about Lose It! on Twitter, which both introduced me to it and sparked trying out a calorie counting diet in the first place.)

Lose It! is a free (as in “go try it right now because you don’t have to pay any money for it”) app for iPhone and iPod Touch that tallies up your food and exercise and tracks it against your day’s budget.

Lose It! has a built-in database of a variety of generic and brand-name foods that is fairly comprehensive. When it falls short, you can add a “custom food” by specifying a calorie count and also an amount, for which Lose It! has a nice diversity of units (“bottle,” “ounce,” “slice,” “scoop,” “stick,” &tc.). I’ve found I’ve had to go to the Web to find between a third and a half of a meal’s components, though this has lessened over time. (As an engineer, I’m pretty much willing to eat the same thing day after day after day.)

Your food calories are added (and your exercise calories subtracted) from your daily budget, which Lose It! calculates using your current and goal weights, and an estimation of your metabolism from height, age, and gender. Lose It! is clever enough to adjust the budget down as your weight changes, since your burn rate will be lower when there’s less of you.
I was initially afraid that the amount of estimation required in calorie counting would turn me off. While Cait will figure out the calorie counts of meals she cooks, and the chain restaurants we visit have published numbers, local restaurants tend not to provide nutrition information, nor does Google, where I eat most of my lunches. As a precise-minded person, I was worried that if I couldn’t tally things exactly “right” I’d give up in frustration.

This, so far at least, has turned out to not be that big of a deal. With calorie counting, consistency matters more than strict correctness, since you can adjust your daily intake budget to compensate for your demonstrated weight loss rate.

Nevertheless I will admit that the pure novelty of playing with Lose It! and calorie counting (“shiny!”) has been wearing thin, so I’m less excited than I used to be about scouring the Web at 11:50AM to find estimations for the day’s lunch. Once again, the promise of continuing my past success has to keep me interested.

For anyone who has an iPhone or iPod Touch and is considering calorie counting, I’d seriously recommend Lose It!. It’s a high-quality, very useful app at a literally unbeatable price.

Daniel Jalkut has called out the “ ubiquitous calorie accountability” that comes from counting with an iPhone app as a crucial element. I’d certainly agree. In The Hacker’s Diet parlance, this is as close to an “eat watch” as I’m likely to get. I rely on Lose It! to be the sensible angel on one shoulder to balance out the pizza-loving, booze-swilling devil on the other. All it seems to take is the little, subtle hint that I should forego the last slice / pint / scone / whatever and I can resist with only minimal grumbling.

And again, I cannot yet argue with the results.

One tool you may remember from The Hacker’s Diet is a moving-average graph of your own weight. Unfortunately, Lose It!’s graph is only of your raw weight data, so I’ve picked up another app to handle this aspect, which I’ll talk about next time.

Getting Smaller with iPhone #1: The Hacker’s Diet

About two months ago, more or less on a whim, I started on a diet. I had had intentions of trimming down with EA Sports Active’s 30 day challenges, but a broken Wii disrupted my rhythm, and after it got back I just couldn’t get myself excited about doing poorly-detected squats and lunges again*.

This is probably just as well, as I would have been disappointed with the results. Burning 200–300 calories three or four days a week won’t lead to impressive weight loss, especially since I’d probably just drink it all back on without noticing: unless one is prepared to forego taste, alcohol, and pride, at 160–180 calories each two bottles of actual beer can easily negate an entire Wii-based workout.

(Also, squats hurt and I don’t like to do them. They hurt in the moment, they hurt later in the afternoon, they hurt the next day. If “regular pain” is a component of your diet and weight loss routine you’ll need a lot more dedication than I to be successful.)

The better strategy for weight loss is to count calories. I recommend reading The Hacker’s Diet for the full explanation, but here’s a quick summary:


In The Hacker’s Diet, John Walker diagnoses run-of-the-mill weight gain as the result of a miscalibrated internal “eat watch.” If you (like me) can’t reliably stop eating when you’ve consumed the amount of calories you’ll burn during the day, you will, perhaps slowly, but definitely surely, gain weight at a rate of 3500 calories per pound. That means that one extra cheese snack a day (at about 125 calories) would come out to 13lbs in a year! And then the years add up…

To maintain weight, one obviously needs to match calorie consumption with burn, and to lose weight just tip things a little farther and consume a bit less. 500 calories a day less means a pound a week, which is gentle enough while still providing tangible results on the scale.

One more plug, because the book is short and free and very well written: The Hacker’s Diet.

My first goal is to lose 40lbs, which should erase most of the Google pounds I’ve gained since college. I’ll probably go further than that, but first things first. I’m currently on the pound-a-week plan of 500 fewer calories than I need per day.

Things have been going pretty well so far: in the past two months I’ve lost about 15lbs, which means that I’ve actually been somewhat under my calorie budget. The absolute hardest time was the second day (as warned by The Hacker’s Diet) when <notadoctor>my blood sugar was low from too-few calories but my body hadn’t started really breaking down fat cells yet</notadoctor>. I was hungry, headachy, and grumpy, but I got over it.

I will admit that I can credit much of my early and easy success to natural causes. At my height and (current?) weight, a “500 fewer” budget still amounts to over 2,400 calories a day, which is enough for a normal breakfast, a reasonable lunch, a hearty dinner, with some left over for snacks and drinks. (Even more so on days when I exercise.) A smaller person would find it significantly more disruptive to cut out 500 calories.

As it is now, I haven’t felt like I’ve really needed to make sacrifices to stay on the diet, which has made it easy. I’ve certainly cut back on beer, going out, and eating gummi bears, but I haven’t cut them out completely. As long as I budget them in the day’s calories (with some hand-wavy bits about still getting enough fruits and vegetables and the like), I can have enough of them that I can be happy.

I worry a bit that I’ll eventually hit a plateau or will otherwise need to get more restrictive with my intake, and I hope that I’ll have the force of will to keep with it. Two months of proven results are nevertheless a strong motivation not to give up yet.

My next post in this series will be about the first of the iPhone apps that’s been helping me along: Lose It!.

* Nevertheless I kept going with Active longer than I did with Wii Fit, which I credit to Active’s structure. Wii Fit’s “click through the menus and do what you like” requires a level of self-direction that I could not muster.