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"It's kind of cathartic. I can sit there and explain this weight loss thing to myself. It gives me perspective."
The Internet is filled with confessional blogs, written by people willing to bare all about their love lives, debts and bosses' bad habits. Fatbloggers too leave out few details. Every morsel eaten, every workout skipped, every ounce gained and lost -- all laid out for the world to read.
"With weight loss, you increase your chance of success if you make the experience social and you develop some cognitive control over what you're eating by writing about it," said Harvey Waxman, a Boston psychologist and instructor at Harvard University Medical School's department of psychiatry. "These fatblogs accomplish both of those things."
That's what Mike Hirshland thought -- before he fell off the fatblogging wagon.
A venture capitalist in Waltham, Mass., he saw Calacanis' early fatblog postings and was inspired. He began writing about his weight on his blog, which is really about start-ups.
But instead of blogging more and eating less, Hirshland found himself eating more and blogging less.
"I started not to blog because I didn't want to write about how badly I was failing," Hirshland said. "I didn't want to have to admit that I had that big old steak last night."
Fatblogger Wil Harris reveled in such details. For anyone who's tried to lose weight, Harris' blog is a familiar if exasperating litany of ups and downs -- the approved muesli breakfast followed by the fried fish and chips extravaganza.
"Today, I will mostly be eating fruit and drinking lots of water in a bid to shift some of this weight," the 24-year-old technology entrepreneur from Oxford, Britain, wrote after an eating binge. "Being fat sucks. But getting thinner rocks."
Harris, who's lost 35 pounds since he started fatblogging in February, said the public exposure made him feel accountable.
"Knowing that I have to report my progress to hundreds of people each day keeps me dedicated," he said.
"I'm a firm believer that doing things as a community helps in so many ways."
Because it's considered cool among the tech set, blogging is a socially acceptable way for men to approach the subject of weight loss, Harris said.
"I really feel that it is de-stigmatizing the issue of weight for men," he said. "People are realizing that discussing weight can be a good thing for guys, and that it's not girly. It's geeky."
Calacanis, who started fatblogging because he had gained too much weight while starting companies, has temporarily stopped writing about his weight-loss efforts while he launches a new venture, a search engine called Mahalo. When he last posted on May 23, he had gotten down to 190 pounds.
alex.pham@latimes.com
The Internet is filled with confessional blogs, written by people willing to bare all about their love lives, debts and bosses' bad habits. Fatbloggers too leave out few details. Every morsel eaten, every workout skipped, every ounce gained and lost -- all laid out for the world to read.
"With weight loss, you increase your chance of success if you make the experience social and you develop some cognitive control over what you're eating by writing about it," said Harvey Waxman, a Boston psychologist and instructor at Harvard University Medical School's department of psychiatry. "These fatblogs accomplish both of those things."
That's what Mike Hirshland thought -- before he fell off the fatblogging wagon.
A venture capitalist in Waltham, Mass., he saw Calacanis' early fatblog postings and was inspired. He began writing about his weight on his blog, which is really about start-ups.
But instead of blogging more and eating less, Hirshland found himself eating more and blogging less.
"I started not to blog because I didn't want to write about how badly I was failing," Hirshland said. "I didn't want to have to admit that I had that big old steak last night."
Fatblogger Wil Harris reveled in such details. For anyone who's tried to lose weight, Harris' blog is a familiar if exasperating litany of ups and downs -- the approved muesli breakfast followed by the fried fish and chips extravaganza.
"Today, I will mostly be eating fruit and drinking lots of water in a bid to shift some of this weight," the 24-year-old technology entrepreneur from Oxford, Britain, wrote after an eating binge. "Being fat sucks. But getting thinner rocks."
Harris, who's lost 35 pounds since he started fatblogging in February, said the public exposure made him feel accountable.
"Knowing that I have to report my progress to hundreds of people each day keeps me dedicated," he said.
"I'm a firm believer that doing things as a community helps in so many ways."
Because it's considered cool among the tech set, blogging is a socially acceptable way for men to approach the subject of weight loss, Harris said.
"I really feel that it is de-stigmatizing the issue of weight for men," he said. "People are realizing that discussing weight can be a good thing for guys, and that it's not girly. It's geeky."
Calacanis, who started fatblogging because he had gained too much weight while starting companies, has temporarily stopped writing about his weight-loss efforts while he launches a new venture, a search engine called Mahalo. When he last posted on May 23, he had gotten down to 190 pounds.
alex.pham@latimes.com
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