I am a strong proponent of measuring percent bodyfat instead of body weight for tracking progress towards fitness and body shape goals. Although there are many different techniques for measuring body fat - each with its own benefits and limitations - it can be cumbersome to track progress over time.
For measurements at home, which I do once per week, I use an Accu-Measure caliper. Although I have a fairly good memory, it can be tough to remember the exact measurement value from the previous week. So today it dawned on me that this could be made much easier by just taking a photo of the calipers immediately after measuring using my phone.
First, I installed the DropBox app for Android (available for iPhone too) on my phone. I created a new folder on my dropbox account named 'bodyfat'.
I then took a quick photo of the current measurement. Once I had a good (clear/focused) photo, I pressed the 'Share' button on the phone. I selected the 'Dropbox' option on the sharing menu, and saved the photo to my 'bodyfat' folder.
The photos are all tagged with the date/time automatically when you take the picture, so you can easily review the history of changes. Here is the photo from my measurement this morning:
I don't really care what the actual values are, as long as they are going in the right direction - not up - and by keeping a photo log of each measurement, I can quickly tell where the numers are headed.
