Could your diet use a tweet?

Over Thanksgiving, I stumbled across a story about a new Twitter feature: Tweet What You Eat. Basically, it’s an online food diary with the added flourish of making public all of your entries. Disastrous–or brilliant?

Some convincing new studies make a case for the latter: Recently, the journal Archives of Internal Medicine published a paper showing that dieters who used online weight-loss tools that offered both feedback and a sense of community lost significantly more weight than those who went at it alone. And a report in Obesity Research demonstrated that the Internet can work as well as offline programs for long-term weight loss.

Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, has long studied the role the Internet plays in self-help. “Dieters are constantly balancing two strong and easily conflicting needs,” he says. “The first is constant support, 24 hours a day, every day.” The second? To not have to stand in front of a group and be judged.

And that’s where the Internet comes in. In online communities, because each participant’s own narrative becomes so intertwined—literally on the same page—with those of other members, monitoring and accountability turn out to be remarkably high. Some online dieters say they regularly correspond with as many as 100 peers at a time, both in chat rooms and through links.

Because the experience is virtual, there’s also a bit of a buffer. Participants don’t have to deal with the overwhelming pressure of confessing their transgressions in person; they can even choose a certain amount anonymity. Furthermore, online, there are always signs of life–community is free and available even at three in the morning, should one need it.

I’d also go so far as to say this stuff can be inspiring. It’s hard to put yourself and your challenges out there–and scrolling through some tweets this morning, I was really struck by how funny and heartening people can be about all of this. I’ve been following some food/cooking twitterers for a while now, after this little investigation, I’m making a point of adding diet stories to the mix.