Walker Tracker Blog

Hi - this is the first post in a series called:

12 Things You Can Do With Walker Tracker

(that you might not have known about)

I’m going to run through a few nifty Walker Tracker tricks and explain how each of them work. To see each of the series, you can click on the ‘12 things you can do with Walker Tracker‘ category. Feel free to ask questions under each post.

1) Add steps by text message (or chat!)

Walker Tracker would like to talk to your mobile phone!

Add a step and step blog entry, check on your Walker Tracker friends or view your stats. Adding steps by text message makes it really easy to stay up to date on your steps when you’re not around a computer.

Here’s how:

Go to your preferences

Click on ‘mobile phone integration’ right there at the top.

Oh no...the dreaded red shoe -- I'm running below the monthly step goal I set for myself.

Hook up your phone

Send a new text message on your phone to this number:

1-425-522-2960

with the text: YourUsername:YourPassword

Bilbo's password is too guessable!

Walker Tracker will answer back within a few seconds to let you know how it worked out.

Walker Tracker accepts various commands. Log in to see them all here http://walkertracker.com/index.php?page=devices

Feel free to reply with a ? or menu at any time for a list of options.

Add Today’s Step Entry

To add today’s step entry, just reply with a number.

eg: 6471

Or add a step entry/blog for any date using this format:

• [####] [date] [blog entry] - send a number, a date and a blog entry and it will record your steps/blog for that date 
  eg: 4838 Oct7 I’m currently hiking up the side of a mountain!

*If you’re outside of the USA/Canada, have a look at the devices page to hook up an Instant Messaging account.

This feature is included in Walker Tracker Pro accounts and all Employee Walking Program accounts. Please keep in mind that your phone service might have text-messaging fees.

Good luck!

According to a new study out of Princeton, rats who have access to high fructose corn syrup become obese. No surprise, right? But this is compared to rats who consumed equal caloric amounts of table sugar. Those rats fared fine.

“This creates a fascinating puzzle. The rats in the Princeton study became obese by drinking high-fructose corn syrup, but not by drinking sucrose. The critical differences in appetite, metabolism and gene expression that underlie this phenomenon are yet to be discovered, but may relate to the fact that excess fructose is being metabolized to produce fat, while glucose is largely being processed for energy or stored as a carbohydrate, called glycogen, in the liver and muscles.”

In addition to drastically lower activity levels, corn syrup certainly seems a likely candidate for blame for radically increased obesity levels in the US:

“In the 40 years since the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup as a cost-effective sweetener in the American diet, rates of obesity in the U.S. have skyrocketed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1970, around 15 percent of the U.S. population met the definition for obesity; today, roughly one-third of the American adults are considered obese.”

Read about the study at Princeton: A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain

I’m very thrilled to introduce map-based competitions.

We’re a big fan of Walker Tracker competitions here. They help you visualize your progress over a period of time. You can compete as a team or as an individual while poking friendly jibes at each other. Alternately, you can have your own private party, where you (or just you and your friends) are the star of the competition.

But when you walk — you cover real distance, and so it’s especially fun to put that analogy on a real map.

How long does it take to walk along the Grand Canyon? To stride along the Columbia river to the ocean? Now you can find out for sure.

As you walk along, milestones are revealed to you, adding a sense of discovery to your journey.

Map competitions are in beta — but please feel free to hop in and try them out.

We received help from the very talented Adam DuVander, who is writing a book on map development on the web. Thanks Adam!