Knowing what you eat is extremely important in dieting. Without this understanding it is virtually impossible to make any improvements. Keeping a log of your food is one of the most effective practices any dieter can take. In fact it is so effective that most people that start logging their food begin to lose weight even before they actually employ any kind of dieting strategy. Just by becoming aware of what you are eating will make you eat less, and over the long term you will be more likely to keep weight off than if you didn't keep a food log. Actually in a recent study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, participants who kept a daily food diary dropped more than twice as much weight as those who did not record their food intake. For serious dieters keeping a food log may be the most important and most effective route to both weight loss and weight maintenance.

But this information is not new; people have known of the effectiveness of food logs for some time now. In fact every leading online weight loss program has some sort of system in place in which users can keep track of what they eat. The internet affords an easy way for dieters to connect with large databases that eliminate the most challenging aspects of keeping a food log: getting accurate energy and nutrient values for everything that they eat, keeping records of this information, and quantifying this information in easily digested and meaningful ways.

Most of the current online weight loss programs have food logs that meet these basic demands. But a problem that remains for many users is the feeling that the process of keeping an online food diary is still somewhat cumbersome. It takes a little too much time, effort and commitment. And this is where we find ourselves, with two forces up against each other: the realizable benefits of keeping a food log, and the effort required in the upkeep.

When designing our system meeting the basic demands were a given, but we thought it was time to push on into the next generation of food logs on the internet, one with an emphasis on ease of use, speed, and relevancy. One that dramatically lowered the effort involved in maintaining a food log so that more users could enjoy its benefits. So they could spend less time searching & logging foods and more time analyzing their behavior identifying problem areas and coming up with solutions.

We offer something completely new. We have rethought the way a food log should work and interact with users. We think we have designed the quickest and easiest food log ever built.

We have found that conventional food logs sometimes have a hard time retrieving relevant results. Ultimately this costs users both time and effort paging through search results to find what they are looking for. Optimization is essential to improving search relevancy. Unfortunately conventional food logs are set up in a way that prevents them from self-optimizing. This is largely due to the fact that many food items in a database have several states, for instance broccoli could be eaten raw, or it could be streamed, boiled, pan fried, and maybe even deep fried. Each of these states are separate items in and of themselves, they have different nutrient values and a different amount of calories. For this reason conventional food logs treat them as completely separate from each other.

The problem with this set up is you cannot optimize search results because food states would become "orphaned" from each other. The most common food states would rise to the top and the least common would be buried deep in the bottom pages of search results. This is problematic because it might make users think that the option they are searching for (the most relevant result) doesn't even exist. An example that might be a little easier to understand is another form of transactional search: buying shoes. Imagine you are searching for a certain kind of shoe and you would like to buy them in the color green. If you went to an online store and searched for the type of shoe and only saw the most popular colors (and green was not among them) you would assume the shoe was not available.

So how can the search results be optimized without running into the "orphan" issue? One way to do it is to treat your food searches in the same way the online store treats its shoes, by bundling it appropriately. While this might seem like an easy solution it is not a perfect one for conventional food logs, as it adds one more step (selecting the food and then selecting the state) and one more page refresh to the process, which dramatically increases the time the user spends logging their food. But is there a better way?

Fortunately for us we do not have to deal with the limitations of a static web page website. Because we are a rich internet application we have more flexibility in the way we can design our user interface. This allows us to bundle food states without the additional step, and without the extra page refresh. Food items are grouped in an easy and convenient way so that users enjoy both speed and ease and at the same time our food log is able to self-optimize.

Because optimization is part of the process we can use the data coming into the food log to add functionality to our features. It might seem like something small but it allows us to leverage the activity of our users into value itself by using popularity other & relevancy feedback mechanisms. This allows us to create a much smarter food log, one that is both automated and customizable, one that is faster and simpler to use than anything before. It is truly, a second generation food log.

A second generation food log meets all the basic requirements of a conventional online food log: it allows users to keep track of what they eat, provides nutrient and energy values for those food items, and adds all these items up so users can view their daily consumption patterns. But unlike first generation food logs, second generation food logs are built with a heavy emphasis on ease of use, speed, and relevancy. The major characteristics of second generation food logs are:

Second generation food logs are built on a more flexible architecture (they are not static html web page based systems) that allow their designers to add functionality and decrease the time it takes to log food. Read more about rich internet applications.

Being built on a more flexible architecture allows second generation food logs to decrease time spent on tasks and increase speed in a variety of ways. First and foremost they are designed to dramatically decrease the amount of page refreshes involved in the logging process. This is done through added user-interface abilities, by immediate application based calculations and a reduction in the amount of steps needed to log each food item. With an emphasis on shortening time there is a corresponding de-emphasis on refresh related activities such as displaying ads (thinjoy actually displays no ads) decreasing noise and improving the user experience. And this makes second generation food logs much faster than their predecessors.

Second generation food logs employ some means of optimizing their search results. This in turn increases relevancy and decreases the amount of effort required of the user to find items they are searching for. Optimization is not limited to food search results; it can also be applied to automated features built into the food log.

Second generation food logs are at least partially automated. This characteristic allows users to log relevant foods quickly and easily without even having to search for food items. Automation can occur in frequently logged items, or items with high logging correlations (like peanut butter to jelly) as well as many other situations.

Second generation food logs use customization in two distinct ways. First they use automation to quickly customize each and every food log to each particular individual user. This customization optimizes the user interface to improve accessibility to relevant food items, and decrease logging times. The other way second generation food logs use customization is allowing users to do so manually. This added flexibility gives users the chance to adapt the food log to their own specific needs.

More functionality and flexibility does not mean they can be more complicated--second generation food logs must be simpler and easier to use than their predecessors.

thinjoy's food log exhibits and embodies all of these characteristics and more.


For those users who really want to dive into the details of the food they are logging we offer a comprehensive food search that displays and graphs the nutritional content of everything in our database. For each food we provide the information for up to eighty different nutrients. Additionally unlike any other food log our database keeps track of standard servings. This information is connected to the food group plan feature that allows users to create and monitor their own food group plan.

Our food log isn't just connected to the food group plan feature; it is fully integrated into an entire suite of features. This makes keeping a food log just a small part of the entire thinjoy experience.

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