Twitter While You Walk!
Do You Twitter While You Walk? If not you may be one of the many who don’t understand it’s appeal for walkers and when walking to lose weight. I like it a lot.
Twitter is called micro-blogging and it enables you to comment on what you are doing right this minute in 140 characters. This is enough to succinctly record something. Others can see your words if they are following you and you can see theirs if you are following them. Once you know someone’s Twitter ID you can find their twitterlog which is simply the list of their comments chronologically. Or you can search a topic such as walking to lose weight and review the results.
This is useful also to contact others as you can send a direct message to a someone else. You can use your own name as an ID or a made up one such as mine: walk2loseweight.
The messages sent over Twitter are called tweets.
Reasons to Use Twitter.
When walking to lose weight and making the process as simple and natural as possible it is really good to put in lots of positive reinforcement. As it goes on, the support of others can become more important but less available. After all 2 weeks is a long time for most “diets” so the initial enthusiasm others may have shown may be reduced to luke warm and that willing listener to the details of your walking progress, is showing signs of flagging interest.
Many like to walk alone and others find it their only option. It is a regular repetitive activity. Find ways of making it fun if you can such as dvds. Everyone does it differently- look for what works for you. Walking for weight loss requires attention to detail such as keeping record of times, steps, distance etc. For example I keep a nightly record of my daily steps.
Often when watching what you eat distraction works as a way to counter eating urges. Twitter is perfect for this. Write about your temptations or something else entirely. If you must describe your temptation remember that distraction works better if you find a reason NOT to eat whatever it is!
It is fun. How often have you had a very interesting question you’d urgently like to ask someone while out for a long walk. I do. Sometimes I will get the answer as well. This requires setting your phone up to send tweets.
It becomes a record of your progress.
If you find a link to a great website you would love to share with like minded people, twitter it.
By following others a sense of community is created.
If you can send text messages you can tweet.
Make It Simple.
One of the simplest methods of reporting your progress and keeping the momentum going is to use Twhirl which enables you to keep your Twitter messages open on your computer screen. A beep sounds when a message comes in either to you or from someone you are following. More importantly for me it allows easy messaging, giving options for shortening urls, doing searches etc.
It can be a distraction so I don’t always have it on.
The other important application is for the phone. Install what is necessary to send and receive tweets via text messaging, depending on your phone. Some only work for sending messages.
Keep your message simple. I don’t have a specific purpose behind my tweets except to add fun and a ‘walking with a friend’ feel while I’m walking. How tweet it is!
