Ms. Hagan and Mr. Fisher

Politicos like Chuck Schumer and Marty Markowitz have been quick to claim Mallory Hagan's new pageant title a victory for "the borough of Kings," nevermind that the Alabama native and former Miss New York is a relatively recent transplant. But as it turns out, one New York City tech startup might also be able to bask in the bling of the Miss America crown.

"In case you haven't yet heard, the new Miss America is a @fitocracy community member + trainee of @DickTalens," LoyalCX founder Sarah Judd Welch tweeted this weekend. Mr. Talens--a former fat kid turned body builder--is one of the cofounders of Fitocracy, an addictive fitness app that motivates users by treating workouts like you're leveling up in Everquest or World of Warcraft. 

The app, which recently released an Android version, stands out in the crowded fitness market for its enviable user engagement numbers. Between the web version and online app, the average user is spending 3.5 hours a month on Fitocracy, Mr. Talens said. That's higher than Tumblr, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Mr. Talens said he was actually introduced to Ms. Hagan last April through Alchemy, another New York-based startup that helps users "unlock the power" of their network of contacts. Alchemy "also introduced us to our CPO, i.e. the Cocken in Dick/Wang/Cocken," he told Betabeat, referring to a delightful confluence of names among Fitocracy's staffers.

After meeting Ms. Hagan for coffee, he ended up working with her for two months prior to the Miss New York competition, which she won. "A lot of women have this notion that in order to lose weight, you need to do a lot of cardio, cut out all fat, all carbohydrates, etc.," when heavy lifting and getting the right nutrients yields better results, Mr. Talens said.

But when it came to a national competition on a bigger stage, he admitted, "I really didn’t know too much about optimizing for a women’s physique in bikini competitions." Mr. Talens continued to offer nutrition and dieting advice, but reached out to the Fitocracy community for suggestions. They helped her find a trainer named Sohee Lee, based out in California and Mark Fisher Fitness, a local gym frequented by Broadway stars.

At the same time, Ms. Hagan became active on the Fitocracy app. "She was talking to all the users. All of our community loved her," said Mr. Wang, who sent us to a video she made which shows her going through her training routine. "She created it for Fitocracy users, which was really cool. She’s become a little bit of a cult icon in the fitness world for women."

As the New York Times noted, Ms. Hagan's win has credited to her tap dancing, campaign against child sexual abuse and dexterous response to a question about gun control. But Mr. Talens pointed out that Ms. Hagan had been runner-up in Miss New York twice before she won. "I don’t know if it was necessarily because of the bikini portion of it, but it certainly helped that she got into fantastic shape," he said.

If Fitocracy gets a bump from its Miss America connection, it'll be icing on the cheat day cake. The app was recently featured on "The Dr. Oz Show," and has been focused on customer support to get data back from new users. Mr. Talens said he wasn't actually sure whether to attribute the deluge of new users to Dr. Oz, its recent Android release, or New Year's resolutions. "January is a very big time for fitness companies," he said.

Mr. Williams atop an ErgoErgo chair (Photo: Holly Huitt)

Stop all the treadmill desks. Cut off the adjustable legs on your standing desk. Prevent the bouncing of the Bosu ball chairs with a single shove. Silence the walking meetings with a company-wide memo.

That was the verse going through our head earlier this afternoon when Betabeat came across this arresting image on Andrew Zebulon Williams' Facebook page. Over gChat, we asked Mr. Williams, a community team specialist at Meetup (and stylish summer shorts enthusiast), what gives. "It's some shit that's like good for your back or something," he explained, sending us a link to the ErgoErgo chair, whose makers appear to be based in New York.

Actual promotional photo (Photo: ErgoErgo.com)

According to Mr. Williams, "to test 'em out," Meetup has ordered 12 of the $100 devices, which also come in orange and advertise themselves as vehicles for something called "dynamic sitting."

Unlike regular, useless, unoptimized sitting, which is slowly killing you (yes, you) this very second via your butt, "dynamic sitting," ErgoErgo promises, will "engage your core and back muscles to build strength and flexibility."

What's more, "ErgoErgo allows the body to move freely in any direction." Just think of all the disruption you'll be able to wreak when you're not being held back by spinal support.

Absperimentin' (Photo by Ian Spanier)

Derek Flanzraich, the 25-year-old Harvard grad founder and CEO of Greatist, has had a pretty productive summer. Greatist, the online health and wellness hub he launched a little over a year ago just skipped past one million monthly uniques. And Mr. Flanzraich, whose PR rep pointed out that he "looks like an Abercrombie model," (duly noted) procured himself a set of six-pack abs, albeit temporarily.

"It took me six weeks to get a six-pack and one-and-a-half weeks to lose it," Mr. Flanzraich told Betabeat last week of the "#Absperiment," he documented on the site.

Greatist has been going through a growth spurt since last December, with audience size increasing an average of 30 percent a month, primarily from users sharing advice on social networks. Over the last 30 days, the site clocked 1.3 million uniques. Chalk it up to Greatist's emphasis on well-researched guides. "We're obsessed with the quality of our content," Mr. Flanzraich said by phone. "I think that's why we're different in the space. Every fact is cited by a PubMed study. Every article is approved by multiple experts."

The site wants to offer a practical alternative to the SEO-addled content farms that populate Google search results for workout questions or the ADD headlines from fitness magazines that seem to contradict themselves every other month (i.e. 5 Ways Coffee Is Slowly Killing You! Caffeine: The Secret to a Longer Life!)

To capitalize on its growing user base, last week Greatist began offering "scientifically based" workout plans from professional trainers--Dan Trink of Peak Performance and Tony Gentilcore of Cressey Performance--based on readers' fitness levels. The startup is calling them Greatist Workouts of the Day or GWODs for short. "It's a mouthful," Mr. Flanzraich admitted.

Rather than target the self-quantifying early adopters, Greatist, which is in the process of closing the paperwork on a seed round,  is "focused on normal people. Normals, as they say."

"Most of our traffic does not come from New York City and California," he explained. "It comes from the South, and it comes from real people who are really trying to figure this out and, for the first-ish time, have a place they can go to that they can rely on."

Greatist's target demographic is the 18-to-35 range, which Mr. Flanzraich considers underserved. "The health space has been focused on people who are older, because that's where the money is. Or at least that's where the money has been thought to be," he said, adding, "We think this group of people are becoming more serious about their health and wellness--not because they have to, but because they recognize its importance in preventing having to in the future."

Currently, site's readers skew female. "It's about 60/40," he said, "which is remarkably good in terms of the male percentage."

Those daily workout plans may become a jumping-off point for Greatist to take its mission mobile. "GWODs are good example of more we can do in the future, we really think we can become the guide for people in terms of what apps, what tools, what experts and what products they should be considering," he noted.

Mr. Flanzraich got the idea for the site based on his own longstanding interest in healthy living. "If someone said, 'How are you able to do so much and stay positive and happy?' I would always point to health and fitness, despite having no idea what I was talking about," he said. "I realized the impact I could have and [it] also blew my mind that there was no place for them to go that would be much better than me."

The site's manuals on subjects like Crossfit, good posture or high-protein snacks read like a conversational digest of what the experts are saying, rather than pushing one solution. "It doesn't have to be, 'Well here's the answer!' Because the truth is most of the time there isn't an answer," Mr. Flanzraich said. "We are content with saying: Look some people think this, some people think that, here's where the majority of the research is pointing to."

Take that #Absperiment, for example. Mr. Flanzraich said he's "considering sort of a follow-up about the disaster that has been the weeks following," to give readers an idea of what happens after. "We're not just seeking the sexy headlines. That kind of click-through thrust. This isn't a page-view game."

Mr. Parkinson

Last August, Betabeat profiled Jay Parkinson, the Williamsburg doctor who first won over New York techies in the late aughts by reinventing annoying doctors visits. The hipster doc hacked together his own system--trading insurance premiums and wait times for a Google Calendar, Skype, and PayPal. He eventually formalized the system under a startup called Hello, Health until he parted ways with the company in 2009.

Now, Mr. Parkison is back at it with a similar venture called Sherpaa, a concierge health service he was just developing when we spoke. Sherpaa works with directly with employers to give company staffers 24/7 phone and email access to Sherpaa's physicians, which the startup refers to as "guides." (Get it??)

Imagine consulting an expert instead of WebMD when you have that weird nagging pain in your jaw, but no time to leave the office. Or opting to email a picture of an injury instead of visiting the emergency room. Sounds well-suited for a heads-down office culture.

The company officially launched earlier this year with Tumblr as its sole client. (Perhaps they were attracted to Sherpaa's excess of vowels.) In recent weeks, Fast Company reports that the healthcare startup has been signing up other clients. But the most telling detail is a stastic Mr. Parkinson shared with GigaOm: so far, 80 percent of Tumblr's employees have used the service.

GigaOm says Sherpaa charges employers a flat-fee per month per employee, but Fast Company describes the business model a little differently:

Sherpaa cuts out wasteful spending by going to companies, analyzing their health care, and securing them a plan that is more in line with how their employees use medical services. They generally recommend a deductible of at least $2,000, and then ask companies to give employees a $2,000 debit card for health care. Whatever they don’t use goes back into the company coffers. In the end, these companies can save $2,000 to $4,000 per employee, even with the debit card.

Sherpaa doctors only work remotely, but can assess whether patients need a prescription or specialist referral. The startup currently has one doctor on call, but 100 specialists and plans to expand to 150 to 200 New York City doctors in the future.

We've reached out Mr. Parkinson for more details and will update you when we hear back.

Not pictured: Fitbit and Withings scale. (via @Naveen)

Don't call it a startup--at least not yet--but Foursquare cofounder Naveen Selvadurai dropped some hints about an upcoming personal project at an event at Union Square Monday evening, as Erick Schonfeld revealed on Twitter.

The de-Crunched tech blogger was at the VC firm for an event about "Networked Health," and Mr. Selvadurai's proposition, taken straight from the Quantified Self rule book, sounded like it fit right in:

Former 4SQ founder @naveen talking about "personal analytics" and how observation c@ Union Square Ventures instagr.am/p/KoAA2XJHlN/

— Erick Schonfeld (@erickschonfeld) May 14, 2012

How @naveen hacks his body: No alcohol, no carbs, no sugar

— Erick Schonfeld (@erickschonfeld) May 14, 2012

What is @naveen's current project?"Google Analytics for everything I know about my body" have to track 3 things: exercise, food, sleep

— Erick Schonfeld (@erickschonfeld) May 14, 2012

As Owen Thomas points out on Business Insider, Mr. Selvadurai and his cofounder Dennis Crowley always tried to pitch Foursquare less as a check-in app and more as a "a data-driven recommendations engine which analyzes and rewards real-world behavior."

That worldview dovetails nicely into the "Quantified Self" movement, which presumes that by measuring and analyzing behavior, one can improve it. (You're less likely to splurge on french fries, say, if life is a game of improving your fitness and all the apps on your homescreen are keeping score.) The target market for QS is somewhere in the Venn diagram between Ray Kurzweil fans and people who keep an Excel doc of their bicep girth. With iPhone apps that can take your blood pressure or sporty spice bracelets that measure "your entire athletic life," you can take that treadmill monitor with you.

Mr. Thomas argues that Quantified Self movement is "a big deal in fitness-obsessed Silicon Valley," but wonders if "the idea may be fresher in New York City." Psssh. You think we don't know from optimization? We invite Mr. Thomas to check out the Betabeat archives where we've explored how #4HB techies have opted for QS as the life-hack du jour. It looks like our old friend Jay Parkinson, Tumblr MD, even made an appearance at the USV event.

Hello, Aria.

At some point in 2003, we walked into a Best Buy and walked out with a scale that measures our body fat percentage. But for the self-quantifiers among us, that kind of static measurement is woefully inadequate.

If you're the kind of human that likes to correlate your BMI to calories burned and access that intel from a dynamic graph on your smartphone for realtime self-flagellation™, then have we got the scale for you!

Yesterday, venture-backed Fitbit started shipping Aria, its long-awaited new Wifi-enabled smart scale that synchs up with the Fitbit Ultra, its wireless pedometer and stair tracker.

The whole thing practically screams:  I am ready for the Singularity, Ray Kurzweil!  

Like the $160 Withings scale, which Rick Webb once called "awwwwwwwwesome,"  Fitbit Aria measures your weight, body fat percentage, and BMI. Only instead of giving you the option of tweeting out that information or loading it up to the personal informatics site, it also lets you synch with your Fitbit for $30 less and access the data online or through an iOS / Android app.

As TechCrunch notes, "These readings help you understand your current health status and remind you, ceaselessly and without mercy, of your – well, my – failures as a biological entity." After this, you should be fully optimized on shaming technologies. But let us know if you need help setting up an Ifttt so everyone on the street laughs at you when you walk into a Shake Shack.

Potential incubatees.

Betabeat has been trying to warn you that the healthcare revolution was coming to tech industry. But Blueprint Health might finally be able to get you out from behind your standing desks and pay attention. Xconomy reports that Blueprint, a member of the TechStars Network, is opening an incubator in January and already taking applications for health-related ventures.

The TechStars connection comes in because members of the network  share best practices across accelerators. In keeping with that model, startups get $20,000 in seed funding and Blueprint takes 6 percent equity. Partner Brad Weinberg, who started his first company, Shape Up, in 2006, says Blueprint, which expects to get 300 applications for 10 spots in the inaugural class, has raised $400,000 and is setting up "a really cool space”  in Union Square. But like TechStars, the big draw seems to be the mentors. They include two techies Betabeat has profiled recently, ZocDoc co-founder Oliver Kharrza and Future Well's Jay Parkinson, as well as experts from Pfizer and VCs from Bessemer, Google Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, and Spark.

This reminded us of an interesting conversation we had with Cornell's Daniel Huttenlocher, Dean of Computing and Information Science. He said Cornell picked "health informatics" as one of the interdisciplinary hubs the school wanted to focus on for its tech campus proposal because that's where the market was headed.

Mr. Talens

This is a guest post by Dick Talens, an amateur competitive bodybuilder and the co-founder and CTO of Fitocracy.  He once looked like the kid from Up (except much rounder) until he traded in his video game time for gym time.  Over the last eight years, he's spent 1000+ hours reading about nutrition and training so that others don't have to.  He tweets about startups and fitness @DickTalens, or you can find him on Fitocracy with that same handle.

Over the last decade I’ve gone from comically fat (note the homeless guy laughing at me) to amateur competitive bodybuilder.  At the same time, I’ve whittled down the hours I spend working out every week from 20+ to less than three, and improved my results.

Because I co-founded a startup, I obsess over the ROI of my time on fitness for myself and my trainees. There’s nothing more painful than seeing people spend hours every week on the treadmill without seeing any change.  So how do you remain fit* while working 80+ hours/week at a startup?  Here’s what you should know.

Fitbit's blood pressure tracker.

Wow, bikini season really has a way of synchronizing brain waves. Farhad Manjoo has an article in The New York Times today about the futuristic gadgets on the market that help you self-quantify your way to better health. Betabeat touched on the same thing in our feature about New York's 4 Hour Body craze. Mr. Manjoo tested out some of the devices we mentioned, including Fitbit and the Withings Wi-Fi scale, as well as MyTrek, Withings blood pressure cuff, a blood pressure monitor by iHealth, and the Exergen TemporalScanner, which he uses to measure his kid's temperature.

User experience designer Whitney Hess, one of the 4HB-ers we interviewed for the article, also mentioned a new tracking bracelet by Jawbone to us. That device, called "Up", measures Up" tracks your movement, eating habits, and sleeping patterns and then transmits the data back to a smartphone app.

Mr. Manjoo gets to the heart of why these self-quantifying with gadgets actually makes an impact on your health. Basically, it's the shame factor. "Although Fitbit doesn’t explicitly acknowledge this in its marketing materials, the gadget makes you feel bad about yourself," he writes, adding:

"The theory underlying Fitbit is that once you know where you’re failing, you can begin to make healthy changes in your life. And these changes don’t have to be very big — for instance, mulling the Fitbit data, I noticed that on the weekend I recorded more than twice as much daily activity as I had on the weekdays. But I don’t recall working especially hard on that weekend — I’d just walked around the garden a couple times to water the plants.

And this was the point: I didn’t even have to do anything strenuous to get in slightly better shape."

You can see we've had this song in our head all week, right? (Body movin', body movin' . . .)

NEW YORK  CITY'S START-UP SCENESTERS

Mr. Webb traced the outbreak back to the carbo-loading marathon that is South by Southwest. Or “beer and taco week,” as Mr. Webb described it. He and several other techies had recently become disciples of The 4 Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman, a life-hacking manual written by Tim Ferriss that distills a decade of experiments into chapters about slow carbs, self-tracking and, yes, how to make a woman orgasm in 15 minutes.

The book is a follow-up to Mr. Ferriss’s wildly popular debut, The 4 Hour Work Week, which also came with its own garrulous subtitle: “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich.” Mr. Ferriss’s second installment purports to help readers “reach their genetic potential in six months” and “lose more fat than a marathoner by bingeing,” featuring seductive advice like “How to Lose 20 Pounds in 30 Days Without Exercise.” The near-600-page tome climbed up the New York Times’s best-sellers list over Christmas and has clung to the top 10 of Hardcover Advice & Misc. since. But judging by the uptick in “cheat day” tweets over the past few weeks and our sudden familiarity with the body fat percentage and breakfast habits of local start-up types, the diet—sorry, body-hacking lifestyle—has taken a few months to fully infiltrate the New York tech ecosystem.

An Old School MIT Hacker Gives us His Top Ten Hacks in History

Although better-known as a music festival, SXSW's 10-day affair in Austin also serves as a petri dish for start-up founders to culture their latest app with eager early adopters. To stay on the no-sugar bandwagon during SXSW’s 24-hour party cycle, Mr. Webb looked to another high-profile New York techie also in attendance, Michael Galpert, co-founder of Aviary, a Madison Square-based photo-editing site. Mr. Galpert knew he would need some kind of support group. So, like any self-respecting start-up founder, he found a way to automate the process.

GroupMe, a New York-based group messaging app, was heavily-hyped heading into SXSW. Mr. Galpert decided to use it to set up a public SMS group to text out what he was eating to fellow techies like Mr. Webb and “my boy,” Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai, arguably one the most recognizable faces out of the city’s tech scene. Mr. Galpert sent out messages like “You can eat here” or “This bar doesn’t have wine.”

“That was an important one,” notes Mr. Webb. (Did we mention you get two glasses of wine every night on this thing? Big selling point for folks who see every elbow-graze as a networking opportunity.)

The buzz around GroupMe, which eventually brought home SXSW’s breakout prize, was bubbling up. “Everybody’s trying the software out. They see this group with me and Galpert and Naveen and they join it to see what we’re talking about. Then they realized it was about men’s dieting,” said Mr. Webb, disintegrating into raspy belly laugh. Men’s dieting? “Well, it was a group of five dudes. They’re like, ‘What are you guys doing?’” Even Mr. Selvaduari was befuddled.  He put the group on mute.

“It probably seems like a cult, huh?” Mr. Webb asked The Observer, his deep laugh reverberating through the phone. Well, maybe more like an infomercial.

The word cult (or “cult-y” or “cultish”) came up repeatedly when we asked start-up founders, venture capitalists and developers why The 4 Hour Body was so popular with the city’s newly forged creative class. No one mentioned the sex advice. “Haha. Everyone’s read that chapter, but so far I don’t know anyone who’s claimed to try it,” Mr. Webb typed via gChat. Another acolyte, Meghan Keane, a former tech reporter and editorial director of B5Media, put it more pointedly: “If you’re staring at/thinking about sex diagrams while having sex, you’re probably doing it wrong.”

If you forgo the sex chapters, questionable tips on holding your breath longer than Houdini, and unapproved Chinese supplements (the readers we spoke to do), the slow carbs and kettlebell regime doesn’t sound that different from, say, the South Beach diet or Power 90 Extreme. Rather, the biggest difference seems to be who, exactly, is downloading it onto their Kindle or iPhone.

Mr. Webb, who’s been a 4HB-er since January, said about 20 of his fellow Barbarians have now read the book. In late July, when Whitney Hess, who has designed user experiences for start-ups like Boxee and Seamless, tweeted, “What are the chances I vomit during cheat day tomorrow?” she CC’d seven other start-up folks, including First Round Capital’s principal, Charlie O’Donnell, and four members of New Work City, the co-working space in Chinatown where a growing cell of 4HB followers regularly plug in their laptops. “Tim’s use of social media probably drives a lot of usage,” Mr. O’Donnell told The Observer. “It’s the only diet I see with a hashtag.”

The tech appeal of The 4 Hour Body also lies in Mr. Ferriss’s personal brand. No optimization aficionado worth his real-time productivity app would be caught dead without The 4 Hour Work Week on his bookshelf. The man Wired magazine once called the “greatest self-promoter in the world” also comes dude-approved. Everything from the cover to Mr. Ferriss’s extreme experimentation barks: It’s not a diet, it’s a life hack, brah. The emphasis on quantifying progress using spreadsheets and tools like Fitbit, a sleep and fitness tracker you can wear around your wrist, also helps sell the idea that The 4 Hour Body is all about optimization, the same way you’d track the financials or traffic for a new web feature. We didn’t meet any 4HB-ers who attended the first-ever Quantified Self conference in Mountain View this May, but we imagine there was some overlap.

For New York techies in particular, however, Mr. Ferriss’s weight-loss philosophy happens to have arrived at a moment of reckoning. Between the late nights and the office kegerators, the first flush of the start-up lifestyle can play out with the same limit-testing zeal as leaving your parents’ house for the college dorm. Now with some experience under their belts, techies are stepping away from their keyboards and deciding to do something about that “founder 15.”

“It goes along with the hacker culture of optimizing and perfecting all different kinds of your life,” said Mr. O’Donnell from First Round’s conference room above Union Square Park. “The tech community in general is unsatisfied with the status quo and wants to find hacks and cheats,” he added, fidgeting with the water bottle that accompanied him on his 9.2-mile bike ride from Bay Ridge that morning. “This is like when they used to play video games and figured out the Contra code: Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right B, A, Start.” The 4 Hour Body operates a self-serve menu of hacks. Even Mr. Ferriss acknowledges there’s no need to read all 592 pages, although the hardcover edition does make a handy kettlebell alternative.

“IN MY CASE, IT WAS MORE LIKE THE FOUNDER 30,” said Mark Webster, who started his own interactive design consultancy, Kickstart Concepts, back in 2009, and is currently working on another venture. Mr. Webster got a copy of The 4 Hour Body when he attended Mr. Ferriss’s launch party in December. “It was at that horrible nightclub, Greenhouse, where there’s always tech parties.” Mr. Webster said he hadn’t seen a critical mass of compatriots on the diet, but a behavioral switch had definitely been flipped. “That whole Mountain Dew late-night pizza culture is dying out. When I go on business breakfast, we’re all ordering egg whites.”

“Maybe it is tech’s dirty little secret, because I’ve seen a lot of people opening their burritos lately,” he added, describing a recent tech lunch, “We were basically standing around some lecture, they got sandwiches, and everyone goes to throw the bread away and eat the filling.”

As evidence of the healthy-office trend, Mr. Webb said, just last month four employees asked him to swap out their office chairs for standing desks at the Barbarian Group. “Standing desks are definitely in vogue right now. You know Jay Parkinson?” he asked, referring to Williamsburg doctor behind Hello, Health. “All of us read his Tumblr and he’s been going on about all this new data about sitting and how bad it is. So, yeah, you’re out all night, you think ‘I don’t need to exercise if I stood up all day.’”

Last month, in a blog post announcing its new ergonomically-optimized 5,000 sq. ft. office space on 6th Avenue, ff Venture Capital partner David Teten also mentioned standing desk, as well as subbing out desk chairs for exercise balls and wobble boards for the VC firm and start-ups that would call the space home. The next week, Mark Peter Davis, co-founder of Kohort, a service for organizing groups, wrote a blog post about office culture entitled, “Why We Do Push-Ups.”

DATA NERDS KNOW that adding variables requires measurement to see what works. “Oh, yeah, personal informatics? I love that shit,” said Mr. Webb. “We all have Daytum and RescueTime. Do you know that one? It’s a personal productivity thing for your computer. It tracks how much time you spend on each program. You look at your stats and you’re like, oh, I spent half my week on Facebook.”

Mr. Webb lost his Fitbit, but he’s created his own system. “I have a spreadsheet in Evernote where I do all the abdomen and leg and arm measurements each weekend and still measure my weight every day. You lose weight so fast, it’s rewarding. I keep it all on a giant spreadsheet and chart it out.” He uses the Withings scale to weigh himself. “Of course we all have it. It’s a scale with Wi-Fi in it that sends your weight to a personal informatics site, which is awwwwwwwwesome.”

Ms. Hess, a self-described numbers person,who got into the 4 Hour Body after watching fellow New Work City denizens Tony Bacigalupoand Fredrick Selby encourage each other by texting photos of cheat day meals and emailing support, says she’s just as into the self-quantifying aspect. “As a curvy woman I did a few different measurements in my torso--butt, hips, belly button, and waist--and then I did bust and I did face. My friends were like, what’s ‘face'?!” Ms. Hess, a pretty, diminutive redhead, told The Observer, moving her hand up her body as she listed each area. “I get puffy in my cheeks when I gain a few pounds, so I put the tape measure around my neck and under my ears and then around to just over my mouth to see what the horizontal circumference would be,” she says, miming the movement. “I tweeted it and people were like, how do you measure your face? They thought I was doing it vertically, like to see how big my chins were.”

After adopting the plan three weeks ago, Ms. Hess says she’s still in the euphoria stage although she’s heard it takes woman longer to drop the weight. “It definitely skews tech and that’s because of Tim. I’d also say it skews very male,” she explained. “There are not a lot of diet books if any out there that a man would be caught dead reading on the subway. But The 4 Hour Body, it sounds like something futuristic, it sounds like Superman.”

An Old School MIT Hacker Gives us His Top Ten Hacks in History