Study: BMI Fails to Detect Obesity

If you follow us on Twitter, read our blog regularly, or visit our site with frequency you quickly noticed that we oppose the use of weight and calorie measurements for those wanting to achieve a leaner, more healthy (fat-free) body.

Now, a recent study determined that there is a "A Massive Underdiagnosis of Obesity When Using Body Mass Index (BMI)"

What is BMI?
The Department of Health and Human Services has a BMI calculator where you enter your height and weight (in English or metric), you click the "Compute BMI" button and it returns the appropriate value. This value is calculated in the following two ways:

English
(weight in pounds * 703 ) / height in inches²

Metric
weight in kilograms / height in meters²

So, What's the Problem?
This seems like a pretty easy way to calculate something, right? The problem is that "the something" you are calculating has absolutely no bearing on the fat content in your body. Consider the following extremes:




It is possible that these two people have the same BMI. They only have to have some combination where the weight divided by the height is equal in each of them.

What the BMI fails to consider is that weight is irrelevant to measuring how much fat you actually have stored in your body.

How Your Weight is Determined
Taking an equal size of each, the following is true (ordered by mass/weight - density):
Bone > Muscle > Water > Fat

In other words, the guy on the right who may have higher bone density (good thing), more muscles (good thing), and perfectly hydrated (good thing) could weight as much or more than someone who has poor bone density, less muscle mass, completely dehydrated, but had 100 pounds of fat.

Please stop weighing yourself. It does a lot more harm than good.

Contact us for information about our fat loss program.

Five Reasons why no one Likes You on Twitter

Five Reasons why no one Likes You on Twitter

I tweeted this article a few months back and thought it would be a great idea to summarize the article in English and translated it into Spanish at http://glicoentrenador.blogspot.com/

The five reasons (explanations for each reason are my own comments):

1. Everyone can see that you are in it for the numbers, not the people
   If your main goal is to have a high rank and grade on Grader or a similar service, people will see right through you and will most likely decide to not follow. Eventually, you will have no real people following you. Your followers will be bots, spammers, and auto-followers.
   
2. You understand social media, but you don’t understand how to be ’social'
   Twitter is about socializing! Yes. You should read tweets posted by those you are following and reply to tweets, post comments on blogs, and retweet (RT) when you come across something of interest.
   
3. You don’t listen
4. You don’t care about the people you want to be following you
   You must care about others! That's the key! When I get see a congratulatory tweet from someone I am following to someone I am not following and who isn't following me, I will take a look at the unknown profile and see if this person just achieved something that I should congratulate them on. At the very minimum you will have a brief chat with that person. That user has just promoted your username to all of his/her followers.
   
5. You don’t promote others
   I automatically unfollow tweeps who do not give credit via RT's to others. Let's say one sends original and very interesting tweets. Then I see two sending the exact same tweets a few hours later. Once, twice... Conisidence, but I note it. If I see it continuously, I unfollow. I also take a look at the profile of those who follow me. If I don't see them sending public messages to other users or they have there are no RT's visible, I'm not going to follow that tweep back.
   

Essentially, people want to follow those who provide interesting information, those who can contribute positively to conversations, and those who are willing to edify others. Be real, converse with other tweeps.

How Retailers Could Profit from Twitter

I'm fairly new to Twitter. I think I've used it for about a month and a half. And really had no clue what it was up until then. I don't consider myself to be an average user of anything, as my mind is always thinking of ways something works or how it can be improved.

Such is the case with Twitter. I have read tweets about retailers and fortune 100 companies getting on Twitter and how big biz is having problem using Twitter to advertise successfully.

I have an idea...

Most sites (Amazon, Walmart, Dell, Zappos, etc.) require that online customers have an account at their site. This makes for and excellent marketing opportunity. Amazon does an amazing job at tracking user preferences and interests to target the marketing for an individual. It is also known that now-a-days (in the Web2.0) era, consumers are interested in what other people are buying and recommending.

Here's my suggestion to online retailers (and if you aren't online, get online and do this):
Make app that will tweet "I just purchased WHATEVER from RETAILER for PRICE. Get yours at URL-TO-PRODUCT" upon a purchase.

This shouldn't be that hard to do. In fact, half the work may already be done! With TwitterFeed, all retailers would have to do is set up an RSS feed for each user. The user would have the option to add this RSS feed to their TwitterFeed.

I am an Amazon affiliate... I would only hope that Amazon would allow consumer recommendations to be tweeted in such a way that the affiliate would receive $. In other words, someone goes to a site that features books. Affiliate gets commission from purchase and Amazon tweets advertisement. Affiliate would also get, at least a partial commission, from purchases that occur by someone following the link on the tweet.

After a few days of having received the product, an option would be extended to the consumer to grade the product. This would generate ANOTHER tweet similar to the previous one but it would contain the grade.

Awesome Twitter Apps: Twaitter & Twitter Grader

My previous post about Twitter applications had information about who I prefer to follow, and how I manage my posts through TweetDeck and TwitterFeed. These two continue to prove invaluable: TweetDeck for everyday interactions with people and TwitterFeed for automated posts of any new content added to our site, our blog, and our Delicious bookmarks.

I have, however, discovered a couple more applications that help manage my content.

Twaitter is a service that allows you to schedule tweets so they may be posted at certain times. For example, a "Happy New Year's" tweet that is sent every January 1st, at 12:00AM. You have the option to set up a reocurring tweet (as would be the example New Year's message) or one time tweets.

How are one-time tweets beneficial?
I use Twitter for networking. I connect with others who share the same interests as I do. I also connect with potential, present, and past customers. There are also people who follow me because they like to read the information I provide. If I know I will be away from my computer for a prolonged period of time, I may enter some tweets that are relevant to the current topic/content I have been tweeting recently and set those tweets to post every hour or two. This way followers get the information they expect. How about setting up a famous #FollowFriday on Wednesday? Sure! You can't possible suggest everyone in one single tweet. So once you have a #FollowFriday tweet that is at capacity, 'set it and forget it' by scheduling the post sometime on Friday.

The next service is for SEO, and marketing research (sort of).

Twitter Grader is a service that works, and can be used, in almost the same manner as Alexa for websites. You simply type in your Twitter username and it will generate a report of the number of followers you have, the number of people you are following, your rank, some suggestions, and a grade. Of course the rank and grades are based on a contrast between your profile and all other Twitter profile.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter: @glycotraner. I am excellent at responding to dire messages (DM) and any other public mentions (@glycotrainer) you make.

To learn more about GlycoTrainer, visit the "About Us" page on GlycoTrainer.com.

Twitter

It's been a few days shy of a month since the first "Tweet" was posted on http://twitter.com/glycotrainer. It took a few days to figure it out, but has been an awesome communication tool since!
The very first person I followed was Tony Robbins (@tonyrobbins). His name showed up in the "Trendy Topics" list. The guy is full of positive energy! It's awesome to read his posts. Once I got the hang of it, I began to look for profiles that posted relative content to ours (health, wellness, finances, motivational, industry news, etc). At the moment, these are my favorites:

• @tonyrobbins - As eluted to earlier, Tony Robbins is the definition of positive. His posts will make your day. His sincerity comes through to you via every single one of his posts. Thank you, Tony!
• @glicoentrenador - GlycoTrainer (us) in Spanish.
• @quotegarden - Health and Motivational quotes.
• @clarkhowardshow - Clark Howard is amazing at finding great offers & at money management. He's money savvy and you are guaranteed to learn how to spend less, save/invest more, legal matters, how to improve your credit score, and a lot more.
• @HealthyMinute - Lots of health information. Pete posts about weight loss and management, proper nutrition, and all types of related information. Tweets very frequently.
• @Prebiotics - This company posts non-stop information and articles about prebiotics and probiotics. A lot of the information they post mentions health benefits of pre- and probiotics.
• @mberg - Ex-coworker, buddy of mine. Matt is part of GeekCorps. He doesn't post as often as he should. When he does, it's about the aide he and his peers offer third-world (Matt happens to be in Africa) countries.
• @WhatsGabyCookin - Delicious food recipes. Gaby is ex tennis player who still works out. So you KNOW this food has to be healthy (for the most part).
• @MannaRelief - Non-profit organization that gives free glyconutrients (and other children's supplements) to orphans worldwide (mostly in third world nations.
• @iamdiddy - Sean Diddy Combs... Tweets motivational messages very often. It's an aw@esome chance to get into a multi-millionaire's head.
• @DaveDube - Inspirational, networking tips. Dave Dube posts a lot of Zig Ziglar quotes.
• @YouQuotedQuoes - Inspirational and motivational quotes.
• @DanTanner - Market information. Dan Tanner posts profit declarations by companies, stock updates, market updates, and other investment related information.
• @PJA64X - Inspirational and motivational quotes.
• @Alyssa_Milano - Enough said.

So, as mentioned, GlycoTrainer has two accounts with Twitter. @glycotrainer for English tweets and @glicoentrenador for Spanish tweets. It was getting a little hectic to keep track of tweets and their translations. I looked into installing TweetDeck a couple of weeks ago but had been unable to do so until this morning. It is awesome!

Keeping track of both accounts is extremely easy! Here's how it works:

• On one column, you are shown you tweets from those you are following. Exact content as is found on "Home" within your Twitter account.
• On another column, you are shown posts that mention you. Exact content as is on "Updates Mentioning [you]" within your Twitter account.
• On another column, you are shown suggestions of people you may want to follow. This seems to not work as well as it should. So far, most of the suggestions I've gotten have been of not interest to me whatsoever.

Of course the columns described above can be removed and added at a later date. They can also be shifted from side to side. The idea here is that the interface is configurable. This is a must-have twitter application.

I have been manually tweeting new site and blog posts. As you can imagine, it can become a hassle to have to log into the blog, write it, go to twitter, get URL from tinyurl.com or something similar, think of clever 140 character (including short URL) statement about blog. And then have to do the same for Spanish. No no... To help with this, I am now (as of today) using TwitterFeed. This application, as TweetDeck, is a must have!
So what this application does is read a feed and post its title and a description. The awesome part of this application is that it automatically shortens the URL and from it, finds the exact number of characters that it will display as a tweet. You can choose to tweet the title only or the title and the articles description. This is going to work out just fine for us at GlycoTrainer because our entire site is powered by WordPress. WordPress provides an RSS Feed that TwitterFreed integrates with easily.