6 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 22.5 ms ] thread
Hey HN! This is Joe (nezaj) and Stopa (stopachka). Both of us are Clojure hackers [1]. For the last few years, we’ve been on a journey to get fit. To do this, we hired a personal trainer, created a mini-community within our friend group, and built custom tools for ourselves, to create a sort of “Datadog for our fitness”.

3 months ago, we had a realization: what if we tried to create a company that did this? A combo of a nutrition coach, personal trainer, community, and custom tools that helps you get in the best shape of your life.

We weren’t experts, so we started off by launching a free cohort, and signing up 20 people. The cohort ended a month ago and folks lost an average of 7-8LBs over the last 3 months. Our top performers had up to 9% weight loss!

It started off with an Excel spreadsheet and a Slack group. But very soon, it turned into (a) a Slack bot, (b) a mobile app, and (c) a curriculum, that progressively sets you up with the habits to reach and maintain the best shape of your life. [2]

With Consistent, you get a bundled set of curriculum and tools to help you learn what you don’t know you don’t know, and make progress.

The program is 4 months, and costs 799 (200 dollars each month). This is equivalent to 2 sessions with a personal trainer a month. To keep us aligned, we’re also offering a 100% money-back guarantee. If at any point you choose to leave the program (even 1 day before close), you can get your money back.

There’s one catch though.

We require you weigh yourself everyday, log your food everyday, and log your exercise everyday. In addition you need to send a reflection once a week as well as a shirtless progress photo.

We've already signed up several founders + engineers and have a couple more spots for our next cohort, which starts October 17th. If you’re interested, please let us know by filling out our interest form!

[1] The story: https://consistent.fit/posts/founder-diaries/

[2] Product demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3izicogMCM

I’ve seen this message over and over again because I have a hacker news RSS feed of the word “spreadsheet”. I’ve flagged this post because it feels like Groundhog Day with this spam. Stop please!
> The program is 4 months, and costs 799 (200 dollars each month). This is equivalent to 2 sessions with a personal trainer a month.

That is absolutely wild.

When I was command fitness leader in the Navy we had a lot of people who needed to lose weight to pass their PRT. I had a very simple process that essentially boiled down to spending the first week measuring your food intake — ignore any form of workout at this point. Then after you get an idea for what you are putting in your body, clean it up and reduce the calories. Incorporate interval training.. it can be anything... rock climbing, spin bike, standing up and sitting down at your desk, etc. Whatever.

The reason the interval training can be so vague is 1.) most of these people never worked out and specific routines are essentially irrelevant when someone behinds their fitness journey (as long as its done safely) and 2.) Abs are made in the kitchen.

Understand your diet, then make incremental changes to dial it in.

You don't need to be worrying about 5/5/2, PPL, the WOD, etc. Just get your food right and you for sure don't need to spend $200 a month on it. I get that these have their place, I promise. I spent most of my adult life lifting.

The fitness industry is so set on "this is the program you should be on", "this is the diet you need to be following", etc.

If you are wanting to lose some weight make one simple step that cost the price of a notebook and pen (or your phone) to start. Spend a week just logging everything in your body. At the end of the week, total it up. Search for healthier alternatives (don't nuke it.. if there are a bazillion alternatives just pick one), and work on burning more calories than you are putting in.

One of greatest mistakes I see people make is over complicating everything then burning themselves out. Fitness is about changing habits.

Sorry for the rant.

Agreed it's about building the habits to make a sustainable lifestyle! We spend the first week having folks record their diet and exercise so we can iterate from there. In the following weeks we define nutritional targets, movement goals, and keep tabs on energy/stress/sleep. Different folks like different diets and exercise and we help them discover what works for them and debug issues as they come up. We layer on habits week over week and provide educational content around weekly themes. By the end of the program folks should be well equipped to maintain their new lifestyle on their own!
Why not have a program dedicated to building mass? If you’re skinny fat like me getting abs isn’t hard, just have to reduce my calories in. However, gaining muscle mass has been difficult
Great question! We're still early, so we're focused on helping people lean out for now. Eventually we want to expand to bulking phases as well!