Dieting and exercising may get boring after some time, and one often feels the need to share the experience with someone

No, I am not going to wear my bariatric surgeon cap and ask you to go under the knife to lose weight. Instead, why don’t you do what you are normally so good at? Meaning, simply use the Web. Ah, you must be thinking, just surf some sites while slurping chilled Coke — and making love to chips, some cookies and such stuff — and get the magic melting machine started! Well, not exactly.

Indeed, you can use your computer to help you shed those extra kilos. Log on to a site like Fatsecret (www.fatsecret.com) and explore. But first, do the free registration bit. Fatsecret is not a typical site that promises you a loss of a tonne of lard in a week and then tries to sell you diets. It simply provides you a space where you can speak up and share your thoughts and experiences, at the same time becoming part of a community that believes “united we fall” — at least in terms of weight! I learn from a man called Jiga, who has come into the nineties from a weight of 100 kg, that he gets his diet to work by eating every two hours to keep his metabolism going. In addition, he goes by some old pearls like “one bad meal does not deserve another”.

You also get a variety of diet-friendly recipes for each meal. I read this laughably simple recipe for breakfast, called “low-fat yoghurt with banana,” where the directions are “chop banana and mix with yoghurt (dahi).” But if you add some chopped almonds, berries or papaya, you are in serious business! However, it is not merely the revision of various diets that matters but a sharing of the psyche: one feels part of a community of people helping each other to lose weight. You could also imagine this site to be a publisher interested in your personal weight loss (or gain) story and doing the job for free!

Like exercise, dieting is good for some time before it gets boring and depressing. Don’t you feel it would be so much better if you had a group with whom you could diet or exercise, so that when you feel down there are others who pep you up? Fatsecret lets you do that. Find friends who will diet with you and share the experience. Who knows, it may just work!

Several other sites too use innovative approaches that help you do better in your weight loss attempts. Traineo ( www.traineo.com) is another free site that works you out by setting up four motivators of your choice and sends weekly updates to them on your weight loss progress. This, surely, should be motivating enough!

If you like to go for the gimmicky stuff, you could try a Geek-a-Cycle (www. slimgeek.com) that costs around $350 and exercise while you work at your desk.

Then there is actually some serious tech that helps you to optimise those morning saunters in the park. Get a Nike with iPod. Check it out at http://store.apple.com by typing “nike” in the search bar. You will also gets loads of accessories that will certainly help you lose money, if not weight! The Nike with iPod is basically a wireless sensor that fits in your Nike shoe and sends the workout data (for instance, how many kilometres you walked, the speed, calories burnt, etc.) to your iPod nano, which you are using in the meanwhile to listen to music. When you come home, sync your iPod to your computer (on the iTunes application) and get the records of your exercise. And, before you ask, it only works with the nano and not with your video iPods.

You could use this on a daily basis as a target-driven exercise programme, and even compete with others online. Just connect your iPod to www.nike.com/nikeplus and enrich yourself with the online community’s running and walking targets and experiences. You can also learn which rock “Powernumbers” are celeb favourites as listening to them might just charge you up as you run. The iPod sports kit (the sensor, stupid!) is cheap at Rs 1,995, but this goes only with the Nike + shoes. And the cushioned things cost only an arm and a leg! Want to buy them? As the company says, “Just Do It!” As for me, well, no thanks, I prefer to wait for them as a birthday gift, some day, some year!