Twitter As a Health and Weight Loss Support Network |

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2511539541_e5d5d8720d_o Unless you have been living under a rock you may or may not of heard of twitter. Just to give you a brief explanation of what it is and how it works twitter is a micro blogging service.

Where you have an online account on twitter.com setting up a account is very easy. Once you have set up your account you are good to go.

In a nutshell, twitter is a 140 character micro blogging service originally it was designed for people who wanted to keep in contact with anybody and everybody. And you told people what you were doing at any particular time of the day.

These days though twitter is slightly more advanced so you can do more with it. When you first sign up you won’t have any followers. However, this post will educate you on how to find them quite easily. Twitter ultimately is a rich source of information and shouldn’t be passed up.

As it could help support you if you are wanting to lose weight and looking for the right type of foods to eat.

You may or may not realise this but there could be 40 or 50 people on twitter who may be trying to achieve the same things as you are. So with a bit of effort you can support each other in real time. Most modern phones have some sort of twitter client on it. However, it mostly applies to more modern expensive phones.

So now you may be thinking will this approach necessarily work for me? Just in case you may be sceptical here is what happened when a reporter from the New York Times tried this very approach. Here is what he said when first starting.

I knew that I could not diet alone; I needed the help of a cheering section.

But rather than write a blog, keep a diary or join Weight Watchers, I decided to use Twitter. I thought it would make me more accountable, because I could record everything I ate instantly. And because Twitter posts are automatically pushed to each person who subscribes to them, an audience — of friends or strangers — can follow along.

The actual reporter who wrote the article is now 75 pounds lighter, which is just over five stones I think we can safely say that the above figure is a very good result to say the least.

Here is one of the tweets that he wrote initially to get started.

My first goal is, I hope, a realistic one: to lose 25 pounds in 25 weeks, by the time I turn 25, on September 3.

He more or less let people know what he was eating whether or not it was bad or good, and what physical activity he was doing at the time.

On and off he left his account for a week or more for then he noticed that something was starting to happen. People were starting to follow him because they were interested in what he was doing.

After a while, of doing regular updates, he was getting replies from people encouraging him and one woman had lost weight along with him. Someone else whom did a similar experiment on twitter by giving updates every day had lost 60 pounds in five months, which is very good. This goes to prove that having moral support, whether it be on or offline does work for the long-term.

How do you find people whom to follow? This may seem harder than it actually is there are a number of ways to find people to follow who may be heading towards the same goals as yourself.

One way to do this is to update your status if you are on Facebook already so people know what you are trying to do and achieve. So if some of your friends are on twitter and are trying to eat healthier and lose weight this would be a good start.

You could use twitter search and put certain keywords in such as “on a diet” “lost five pounds this week” “for breakfast I ate” this will help you to find people similar to yourself.

Also on twitter if you look on your profile as it starts to grow you will find something called recommended follows these are people who twitter has recommended that you follow. When you first see it there may be two people for you to follow, but if you look beneath that there is a link that says view all if you click on that then you will see more people you can follow.

They have also grouped them into categories such as health, etc. this will make it even easier for you to follow the people who will be beneficial to yourself. It’s a matter of personal preference. Among those you will probably find health magazines, sites, etc.

Which may also be able to help you in your quest to become fitter and healthier. The great thing about twitter is everything is all in one place, and once you start to build followers you will not only have a wealth of information but also a great supporter network.

Once you get going on twitter look out for people’s lists that they have created you can subscribe to these and only the people that are on the list of the ones that you will see. This is a great way to get select information from certain users.Another great thing about twitter is there is no cost involved the only investment is your own time, which is a small price to pay especially when it comes to your health.