I’m fat.

I stepped on the scale this morning and it appears I have once again eclipsed the magical 300-pound mark. How embarrassing.

It’s time to prioritize my health instead of work, social networking, education and other things I’ve been using as excuses. Now, how can I trick myself into believing a healthy exercise regimen and sensible diet are fun? The answer for me is, of course, to figure out a way to geek out while accomplishing these goals.

Geocaching
I’m pretty sure Geocaching was invented to trick geeks into leaving their computer terminals to go for a walk in the woods. The premise: a real-life treasure hunt for people with GPS devices. Go to Geocaching.com to find info, including GPS coordinates, of the cache you want to find. Then, just navigate to the treasure. A lot of caches are in urban parks and public property, but the most challenging caches, with the best booty, are often located off hiking trails deep in the woods.

RunKeeper
I used to use RunKeeper to track walks with my beloved pooch (@ReeseTheDog), but she’s living the leash-free good life now on acres of wooded land owned by my parents. It’s a lot tougher to motivate myself to walk without her, but when I do, I’ll be able to track my time, distance and calories burned with RunKeeper. Plus, it also maps my route so I can duplicate my route for consistency. Anyone taking bets on how long it will take before I can actually run a route instead of just walk it?

DailyBurn
The data nerd in me wants to take a data-driven approach to getting fit. In order to do that, I need a centralized place to collect, sort and synthesize all the data. That’s where DailyBurn comes in. It’s a lot like other dieting websites. I can enter my meals and exercise and it calculates my calories consumed and burned to help keep me on track. It also integrates with other gadgets and services, and it also features support groups, motivators and discussion boards.

Withings Scale
Speaking of gadgets integrating with DailyBurn, the Withings scale is one of them. This Wi-fi-enabled scale records your weight, body-mass index and other measurements, and sends them to the web. If I ever splurge and pay $159 for one of these bad boys, you can bet that I’ll not only sync my info with DailyBurn, I’ll also broadcast it to the entire world via Twitter. Public shame can be a good motivator for losing weight, right?

Google Maps Bike Routes
Eventually, I’ll get sick of walking around my neighborhood and I’ll need to go a bit further. It seems like jumping on a bicycle would be a good way to accomplish that, but urban bike-riding can be daunting to a beginner. Luckily, I can get a clue by checking out the bicycling view in Google Maps before my ride. Even though it doesn’t tell me that 23rd Avenue is a huge hill, it does tell me that I can pedal there without being flattened by a semi truck.

Do you have any technology tips to help a fat geek get back into shape (other than going to the gym)? Tell me in the comments.

A month or two ago, I started using an iPhone app called RunKeeper to log how far and how often I take long dog walks. I’m trying a variety of routes to see which one are easiest, longest, etc.

The program uses the GPS in the iPhone to track exactly where you are walking. Of course, you can make the maps private if you’re afraid of stalkers. It’s a free app, so it’s worth a try.

If you have the first-generation iPhone (like I do), you’ll have to go in and manually clean up the map coordinates after your walk, because the first-generation iPhone’s location reporting is based on unreliable cell tower triangulation, not GPS. But, if you have an iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS, it will probably work perfectly for you. It’s a good alternative to the Nike + system.

Check out a (cleaned up) map of my latest 5.21-mile walk by clicking the above image or going to http://bit.ly/M4AL8.

Originally published on my lifestream at MichealFoley.com