User Tinta just completed his Lose It or Lose It plan and made his goal on all ten of his weigh-ins. We’ve started calling a FLAWLESS VICTORY. Not only that, but he made it look easy, with nothing but a laconic smiley-face on each post.
Great work, Tinta! Your official, can’t-be-purchased Lose It or Lose It FLAWLESS VICTORY Nerd Merit Badge is on the way!
We love it when folks make their goals and keep their money, because then we don’t just have a weight-loss-motivation site with a funny premise. We have a weight-loss-motivation site with a funny premise that actually works, which is a much, much more important thing to be involved with. We love it when people lose lots of weight with LIOLI. It’s working for us, and it’s working for these folks! Hurrah!
If you’re like us, you have one group of friends that you talk to on Twitter, and a whole other group of friends, family members and old school chums that you talk to on Facebook. Those Facebook folks are just itching for an opportunity to cheer you on. And now it’s easy to do that!
We’ve added the ability to add your weigh-ins to your Facebook news feed. Get your friends and co-workers to “like” your effort, and to give you all sorts of encouragement! Here’s John’s last weigh-in from this week, as it appeared in his FB feed:
To turn on Facebook integration, sign in to your account and click “Settings” at the top of the screen. You’ll find a “Facebook” link on the left. Click that, then grant Facebook access, and you’re ready to get lots of help and encouragement from your extended Facebook network!
Every Lose It or Lose It user gets a daily reminder: “STEP AWAY FROM THE CHEESEBURGER!” we exhort our users. “DON’T CONCENTRATE ON THAT TWENTY POUNDS, just concentrate on the two pounds you need to lose for your next weigh-in!”
Users can get their reminders either through email or SMS. At least, they could until we discovered that Clickatell, had been accepting our SMS messages for delivery BUT NOT SENDING THEM since February 25th!
Without the SMS reminders, our users were in imminent danger of re-lard-i-fication! What might they do if we are not constantly nagging them to make good choices?
Randy heard about Twilio, a cloud-telephony service that lets your website actually call your users on the telephone and play MP3 files to them (that’s to start with; there’s a whole bunch of XML stuff you can do, too.) What we needed was an option to replace SMS — and fast!
So during lunch we ran around the corner to the local AM radio station (WCHE 1520 in West Chester, PA), and asked them to let us record some voice reminders to send as outbound telephone calls through Twilio. John (on the left) and Randy (on the right) are recording one of the message that YOU will hear on your phone when you sign up for a 10-, 20-, or 30-pound Lose It or Lose It plan!
Here’s the message we were recording in the picture above.
MAN, did we have a good time doing this. Especially with JT, the morning-host DJ and studio technician, to clean up our goofy recording and make us sound like we actually know what we are doing. Thanks, JT! We’ll be back to record more reminders! And thanks, Twilio, for making it so easy to solve our SMS emergency!
Voice reminders should appear as an option in your preferences starting this weekend — as soon as Randy stops raging long enough to be able to see his monitor again!
UPDATE: I got my voice message delivered tonight, and I wasn’t fast enough on the draw, so my phone sent it to Google Voice. Here’s the transcript that GV emailed me a minute later. My favorite bit: “now that you’re ON THE ZAR”!
“This has been the oddest and smartest holiday season I’ve ever had food-intake-wise.” — Ellen
Have problems sticking to a weight-loss plan? It could be because you keep procrastinating! The Economist has some info on why this may be happening. Use Lose It or Lose It to force you to not procrastinate for the next 10 weeks and lose 10-30 lb!
The site Beautiful People just kicked out 5000 members for gaining weight over the holidays (Mashable and Techcrunch). If you are no longer considered beautiful, don’t worry, we’ll still love you and welcome you with open arms! If you use our Lose It or Lose It to lose some weight, they may just take you back. That is, if you want to go back :).
We just pushed an update that allows users to see other user’s weigh-ins. Just click on the “Community” tab at the top of your profile to see how other people are doing. This is currently only visible to Lose It or Lose It users.
If you don’t have an account yet, check out the landing page where we show four random profiles on each page load:
Thank you and we hope this update enhances your Lose It or Lose It experience!
Shut up! Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them. -
Derek talks about how stating your plans makes you less likely to accomplish them because in your own mind, that is the same thing as actually doing it. Makes sense… however, I think you should announce your plans to lose weight then use Lose It or Lose It to stick to it!
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Previously it was a little bit difficult to see who was using Lose It or Lose It. We will be adding some features that make it easier to find other users, starting with some profiles on the landing page!