Diet Bloggers Deal in Brutal Honesty in Quest for Weight Loss

In a world where New Year's weight loss resolutions routinely fall by the wayside, a growing legion of dieters like Schroeder have found their resolve within the blogosphere, documenting their daily successes and failures for a sometimes-anonymous audience.
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Diet bloggers use their blogs and the community support built around them to not only record the progress of their health and fitness goals but also to examine the cultural and psychological stigmas of poor health and how they fell as far as they did. And often they find that it's the constant cheerleaders populating their comments sections -- providing a mixture of tough love and gentle coaxing -- that allow them to fight the cravings and pitfalls along the way.

"The interesting thing is even though you don't know these readers, you feel accountable to them," Schroeder told me. "They know your personal life, they see pictures of your hideous body on the internet that you've pretty much opened everybody to see...There are confessionals there. If I've fallen, I'm not going to bulls*** the readers. I want them to know that I'm human and I make mistakes. I eat poorly. I make bad decisions about food still. Although some people read the blog for entertainment value, I'm not just putting fluff in there. This is who I am and I'm trying to be as real as possible."

In fact many of these bloggers will say that brutal honesty is necessary for the diet blogging to work -- after all, most will post shirtless, unflattering pictures of themselves, exposing every physical insecurity for the world to see. "I don't think that it's like a Weight Watchers meeting, where you go in and everyone circles around and they clap for you," Schroeder said. "It's more raw than that. I don't pretend to be in that class of people."