At my height, 180 lbs. isn’t terrible, but the trajectory is obviously wrong. Without adjustments to my lifestyle, you can see what would happen. So I started paying attention.

In February, Laura and I got iPhones. Shortly after, I discovered Lose It!, a calorie-counting and weight-tracking app. I knew my eat-box-of-cheez-its-when-bored habit was bad, so I began simply tracking calories with Lose It!, hoping to break some bad habits. After all, if you give an engineer some data, he’ll optimize it.

A few weeks later, I ended up reading The Hacker’s Diet. It’s a quick, educational, and inspirational read. John Walker’s thesis is that anyone can lose weight if they correct the flawed feedback mechanisms causing them to eat more than they consume every day.

See, our bodies are complicated machines. We can’t entirely understand them, so we use models (created by people smarter than me) to help us predict how our bodies will behave under various inputs. Thus, there are tons of weight loss plans, and I’m sure they’ve all worked for someone: all raw, low-carb, no-carb, low-calorie, intense exercise, glass of red wine every night, protein shakes in the morning, seven snacks a day, etc. etc.

All of that is too complicated for me, so I chose the simplest model I knew: Calories In, Calories Out. It goes something like this:

In the Apple accessory ecosystem, there are thousands of different items for the Mac, iPhone, iPod, and iPad. Out of that huge world, I can think of only one accessory that you can actually stand on -- The Withings Connected Body Scale (US$159.00). I've had the pleasure of using one of these internet-connected scales for about a year now, and I find it to be a help in my daily battle between being a foodie and trying to maintain a decent weight.

Although the Withings Scale can be used with any computer, I like to think of it as an Apple accessory, since I can use my Mac, iPhone, and iPad in various ways to check my diet progress. Withings provides a free iOS app (WiScale) that gives you password-protected access to your weight information, or you can visit the main Withings website to view the same data on your free account.

The scale measures and calculates your weight, fat mass, and BMI (Body Mass Index), and then it transmits that information to the Withings servers via a Wi-Fi connection to your network. Within a very short amount of time, that information can either be accessed privately via a variety of methods or can be sent to the world via Facebook, Twitter, or a blog widget.

The WiFi Body Scale
Your weight charts in your pocket