From her starting weight of 82.6kg, Jennifer Hardesty, 1.57m inches tall, faithfully recorded her daily weight loss battles down to 63.5kg in an online diary that attracted an audience of hundreds of strangers a day.
When she abruptly stopped posting last month -- still 6.8kg from her goal -- Hardesty's readers, who know her by only her Web pseudonym, were dismayed. Several sent inquiring e-mail messages. "Where have you gone?" one reader demanded.
The prodding was just what Hardesty, 32, of Metairie, Louisiana, was counting on. She had regained a few pounds, she finally admitted on her Web log. "Sadly, there have been deli muffins," she wrote in a recent posting. "It's time to get back on track."
In one of the most personal genres to emerge from the online journal format known as Web logs or blogs, hundreds of overweight women -- and some men, too -- are sharing detailed reports of their calories and cravings on self-created sites like Tales of a Bathroom Scale, Pound and The Fat Diaries.
At a time when more than a third of Americans are trying low-carb diets, low-fat diets, and everything in between -- almost all without lasting success -- Web journals have come to serve as an unlikely grass-roots support system, especially for the severely overweight. Their collective readership appears to number in the tens of thousands.
"By saying you're going to lose weight, you're admitting that something is wrong with you," says Kat, who does not disclose her identity in her blog on skinnykat.com. She revealed its existence to her husband only after she had lost 6.8kg of the 36.3kg she is aiming for. "That's more difficult to do with people you know than a complete stranger," she said.
Created with software that requires no knowledge of Web design, blogs feature short, frequent updates arranged chronologically, a format that lends itself to long-term weight-loss projects.
Dieters also say the online forum provides a rare opportunity to publicly unburden themselves about a stigmatized subject that some are ashamed to share with family, friends and co-workers. Lists of links to each other's blogs accelerate the feedback loop of celebration and commiseration.
Baggy before
Many who stick to baggy clothes in real life post close-up "before" and regularly updated "after" pictures for all the Internet to see. While typically cloaked in pseudonyms, nearly all publish weekly logs of what they say is their true and exact weight.
Among the million or so Web logs, diet blogs are unusual in their blend of deep self-revelation on the same narrow theme. Most eschew the snarky tone that has become a blog hallmark for straightforward reports ("One low fat strawberry cereal bar, two sliced up cucumbers with low fat dressing, one low fat Michelina's meals") or sincere introspection. Few are written by the high-tech hipsters or self-styled political pundits who have so far dominated blog discourse.
"Hard-core bloggers tend to laugh at the diet blogs," said Julie Ridl, author of the Skinny Daily Post, where she records her efforts to keep off the 45.4kg she has lost. "But if you're really battling with weight loss, you know how hard it is to get help from people. The blogging technology lets you pound your intentions to the wall and say, `I'm going to do this thing, watch me."'
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