By: Leslie Goldman

Oct 27, 2009

First we had calorie logs and food journals.

Then diet blogs.

Then food photoblogging.

Now, women looking to take control of their fat and calorie intake have yet another venue in which to obsess: Food tweets.
 
At Tweet What You Eat, you can enter every little stick of gum, glass of red wine and fun-sized Snickers bar (ooh, that should be fun, considering it’s Halloween weekend!) into your Twitter food diary, for the whole universe to see, along with their approximate calorie counts. At the end of the day, Tweet What You Eat will tally up your total, as well as remind you of your pre-selected “Do not eat!” taboo food list.

There’s also a general forum where users can post questions (“What do you do when friends send you a gorgeous delivery of cupcakes to the office?? I ate it and have now just added '1/2 cupcake' to my do not eat list. What can i do to boost willpower?” or generate support (“It's my third weigh in tomorrow. so far i've lost 4.4. let's hope i can lose another lb! :-) ”)

There’s definitely a voyeuristic aspect to the site – your screen is constantly updated with what others are “tweating,” à la:

JoRoch had a pastry (300 calories)1 minute ago

pretty_robot chased some gherkin pickles (15 calories) and paté (120 calories) with a coffee & “semi-skinny” milk 2 minutes ago  (Me: Good lord, pretty_robot – are those pregnancy cravings?)

zannie_w had a Diet Coke (0 calories) 3 minutes ago

You can also access other users’ personal logs and see what exactly their mouths and stomachs have been up to.

Research backs up the theory that maintaining a food journal can double a person’s weight loss. So if your goal is to get healthy, I’m all for using whatever venue (Facebook, blog, this super-cute Hello Kitty diary) works best for you. I just hope people don’t start using this as a method to, in a sense, shame themselves into eating “perfectly” or berating themselves for, say, standing in front of their fridge and eating cold honey mustard chicken in their bra and underwear (not that I’ve done this in the past 12 hours). Or, that they become so obsessed with notating and e-blasting every morsel of food to pass their lips that they start caring more about the Twitter than their dinner companion. Have you ever tried eating with a chronic Twitterer? It has its non-caloric downfalls.