Posted December 24, 2011
Want props for not gobbling up that piece of pumpkin pie or helping yourself to seconds of holiday ham?
Frank Topper, of Corte Madera, and Kevin Wildenradt, a San Francisco University High School senior, have designed FatApp, an iPhone application that calculates the weight you didn’t gain by resisting temptation.
“Most diet things are focused on what you do eat,” said Wildenradt, 18. “(With FatApp), you can take it any way you want — you can either say, “Oh that’s funny, I won’t eat 10,000 buckets of (Kentucky Fried Chicken)” or you can take it entirely seriously when you’re at a dinner party and you’re reaching for a dinner roll and say, ‘I’m going to record this.'”
The application lets users select foods they wanted to eat but didn’t. It then calculates unconsumed calories and converts them to pounds not gained.
For users who want to donate money to people who don’t have enough to eat, FatApp even has a button that links to Action Against Hunger’s website. Topper, who works at Stanford University, said he often performs internal audits to identify problems. He has long pondered how one can measure risks that good policies have already prevented.
“This was bonking around my mind and then the food thing came along and then I went, ‘Eureka!'” said Topper, 56.
After coming up with the idea of counting unconsumed calories, Topper called Wildenradt, his daughter’s former boyfriend, and suggested they work
together.
Wildenradt did the coding and design, completing a large portion of the work this past summer while he was at a Stanford computer camp, and FatApp became available in the iTunes store shortly beforeThanksgiving.
About 300 people have downloaded the app so far, Wildenradt said. It normally costs 99 cents but will be free for the holiday season, from Dec. 20 through Jan. 1.
Topper also produced a humorous animated YouTube video called “You didn’t eat it” as an accompaniment to the application with help from several people, including Novato High School senior Drew Corey, who composed and performed the theme song.
FatApp “seemed way better than most diet ideas because most of (them are) really negative, and this seems like a positive way to do it,” said Corey, 17, who said she was thrilled at “any opportunity to compose.”
Most of the feedback on the application has been positive so far, Topper said.
“I got a lot of feedback and some dietitians are putting it on their websites,” he noted.
Contact Jessica Bernstein-Wax via email at jbernstein-wax@marinij.com
ONLINE
— To download FatApp, go to http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fatapp/id477068404?mt8.
— To watch Topper’s YouTube video, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?vCb8vnEXTOHQ.
©2011 The Marin Independent Journal (Novato, Calif.)
