Tweet What You Eat

A Twitter application that helps people track what they eat, thereby encouraging them to eat more healthily.

Writing In The Daily Mail, Lucy Cavendish announced:

It’s called TweetWhatYouEat, commonly known as twye. It’s the latest diet tool and apparently thousands are signing up to it every week.

The concept is simple. It is, basically, an online food diary where you log absolutely everything you eat and drink.

The site was actually launched in January 2008 by Alex Ressi. According toThe Telegraph:

The application, which already has more than 8,000 followers, has a “CrowdCal system,” a completely crowd-sourced calorie database, which fills in food entries’ calorie count based on what other members have entered. It allows you to keep track of your weight to see if the diet is working while there is also a forum for dieters to discuss food.

TweetWhatYouEat is one of a host of self-tracking tools which allow users to catalogue the minutiae of their lives. In a June 2009 article for Wired, Gary Wolf noted:

Numbers are making their way into the smallest crevices of our lives. We have pedometers in the soles of our shoes and phones that can post our location as we move around town. We can tweet what we eat into a database and subscribe to Web services that track our finances. There are sites and programs for monitoring mood, pain, blood sugar, blood pressure, heart rate, cognitive alacrity, menstruation, and prayers. Even sleep – a challenge to self-track, obviously, since you’re unconscious – is yielding to the skill of the widget maker. With an accelerometer and some decent algorithms, you will soon be able to record your sleep patterns with technology that costs less than $100.