What is everyone using to log health data — and which numbers?

[unclebuff702]

First off, I'm a bit of a tech nerd, and even I find the number of options overwhelming!

So what do you track your health with? Macros? Workouts? And which metrics and KPIs genuinely get tracked?

At the moment that's an Amazfit Trex Pro 3 plus a Fitbit Air. Health anxiety tied to OCD pushed me off the watch and onto the Fitbit Air, since nothing on it screams at me from my wrist, but the Google Health app tracks macros poorly so the Zepp (Amazfit) app still handles my CICO etc. Weightlifting progress lives in the Strong app, while HR / SpO2 / sleep go into Google Health, both through workouts and continuously across the day. BP gets taken manually mid morning and again before bed, then written down in a note book. Blood glucose tracking is next, and I'll probably handle it the same way as BP, though the Zepp app does give me somewhere to log digitally on my phone...

Pep-pedia covers inventory and protocols for my research, but offers nothing for suppliments or HRT, and shotzy handles my Tirz along with estimated blood serum levels of the GLP.

Once a week all of it goes into Gemini, which builds me a pretty sick HTML tracking dashboard for the browser so I can compare trends over time.

The result is paralysis by analysis while I decide whether to keep Fitbit or go back to wearing the Amazfit. Worth noting: whatever money doesn't go on research chemicals tends to go on luxury timepieces, so I do enjoy rocking a fancy pants watch.

What do you use for health and fitness tracking, if anything, and which metrics do you genuinely follow over time?

Also worth mentioning, I'm one of those anti-apple guys, so an Apple watch is a no go

 

[TacoLifter420]

Sleep and health stats land in my Samsung watch and its health app.

Food, calories and macros go into that same health app.

Training intensity gets adjusted according to the sleep and HRV numbers from the night before.

BP is logged manually once a week, always in the same spot.

Then gpt reviews the data and hands me key points worth researching further. AI can't be trusted unless the important parts get verified independently — left unchecked it wanders off the rails.

Nice idea starting this thread. Curious what others do as well.

 

[HereKittyKitty]

Boringly simple here. Sleep and HR come from Samsung Health. Pep inventory is on paper (a ridiculous spreadsheet got started, but spreadsheets are my whole working day and I couldn't stomach any more .XLSX in my days). Dosing goes in the phone calendar. Food, hydration, supplements, activity and weight live in Bariatric.

Building my own app, as it happens. LOL

 

[Foggy-Hollow]

A Garmin 265 lives on my wrist 24/7. HRV, sleep, and any workout I manually start or stop all get recorded. Too much evening stress and it yells at me.

BP gets tracked whenever I know something's off. Nothing fancier than a phone app.

Running mileage gets tracked, though these days it's time on feet rather than literal miles, since I'm heavy and slow. Mostly it's a sheet of paper stuck on the wall.

Food tracking means watching electrolytes, heart-related ones above all. Keeping my appetite in check is what macros are for; 40-30-30 was eye opening (carbs 40%). Water too. Lose it is the app I picked because of which micronutrients it covers.

If I had to narrow the KEY indicators to one, it would be HRV. It flags when stress has been running too long, or when illness is coming.

With a race on the calendar, mileage gets turned into a visual for motivation. Something of an x-factor: all these workouts exist, so today is doable too.

Weight lifting lives in Google Sheets, with my phone on me at the gym. Records are patchy, but my bench sits steadily at 6x 70lbs and as a F49 that pleases me. Programs can be preloaded on a computer and reached easily at the gym.

It really comes down to your goals. KPIs ought to predict whether a goal is reachable, or show what to adjust to get there.

As a fitness tracker, Garmin gets my adore. They've led that space for decades, and were among the prime GPS navigators before smart phones arrived. A 305 triathlon watch (circa 2006) was my first — killed by swimming with it on during a race … yes really. Water resistant enough to wash your hands, not waterproof. Their gear wears like iron, and they've had to diversify markets to keep growing because they are their own worst enemy.

Features are increasingly locked behind higher models, which annoys me on principle. Afib alert used to switch on for me but that went away from the 265. An incentive to upgrade, presumably.

With fellow techies around, AMOLED screens are beautiful. Screens can be downloaded in a myriad of styles, some carrying many data fields. Some cost nothing, some are a few bucks.

Garmin Connect holds every bit of my data going back to (guessing) 2006. Lamenting how fast I was in 2010-2011 is a regular hobby.

There's also RunningAhead, a throwback to 1995 software (in a loving sense) that's robust and also holds data forever.

Garmin had a position I applied for, and I fan-girled my way through the screening interview far too hard. One of the very few times I didn't get a call back lol. So yes, I know I can go on too much.

Their workouts span a myriad of activities, and what weightlifting I'm doing gets predicted pretty well.

 

[Foggy-Hollow]

unclebuff702 said:

First off, I'm a bit of a tech nerd, and even I find the number of options overwhelming!

So what do you track your health with? Macros? Workouts? And which metrics and KPIs genuinely get tracked?

At the moment that's an Amazfit Trex Pro 3 plus a Fitbit Air. Health anxiety tied to OCD pushed me off the watch and onto the Fitbit Air, since nothing on it screams at me from my wrist, but the Google Health app tracks macros poorly so the Zepp (Amazfit) app still handles my CICO etc. Weightlifting progress lives in the Strong app, while HR / SpO2 / sleep go into Google Health, both through workouts and continuously across the day. BP gets taken manually mid morning and again before bed, then written down in a note book. Blood glucose tracking is next, and I'll probably handle it the same way as BP, though the Zepp app does give me somewhere to log digitally on my phone...

Pep-pedia covers inventory and protocols for my research, but offers nothing for suppliments or HRT, and shotzy handles my Tirz along with estimated blood serum levels of the GLP.

Once a week all of it goes into Gemini, which builds me a pretty sick HTML tracking dashboard for the browser so I can compare trends over time.

The result is paralysis by analysis while I decide whether to keep Fitbit or go back to wearing the Amazfit. Worth noting: whatever money doesn't go on research chemicals tends to go on luxury timepieces, so I do enjoy rocking a fancy pants watch.

What do you use for health and fitness tracking, if anything, and which metrics do you genuinely follow over time?

Also worth mentioning, I'm one of those anti-apple guys, so an Apple watch is a no go

Now I'm considering whether all or some of my data could be pulled together more comprehensively, since scattered is what I've been without meaning to be. Treating workouts, fueling and the rest as separate topics really doesn't appeal next to this.

Thanks for sparking the idea!

 

[unclebuff702]

TacoLifter420 said:

Sleep and health stats land in my Samsung watch and its health app.

Food, calories and macros go into that same health app.

Training intensity gets adjusted according to the sleep and HRV numbers from the night before.

BP is logged manually once a week, always in the same spot.

Then gpt reviews the data and hands me key points worth researching further. AI can't be trusted unless the important parts get verified independently — left unchecked it wanders off the rails.

Nice idea starting this thread. Curious what others do as well.

Samsung is a blind spot for me, so that's worth a look! You're spot on about AI — some wild hallucinations have hit me before. Things improved a lot once I built a custom NotebookLLM with every bit of my data aggregation running through a drive repo.

Asking it wild crap to test it is still a habit, and its recommendations always get cross referenced with another LLM plus my own research.

 

[unclebuff702]

Foggy-Hollow said:

A Garmin 265 lives on my wrist 24/7. HRV, sleep, and any workout I manually start or stop all get recorded. Too much evening stress and it yells at me.

BP gets tracked whenever I know something's off. Nothing fancier than a phone app.

Running mileage gets tracked, though these days it's time on feet rather than literal miles, since I'm heavy and slow. Mostly it's a sheet of paper stuck on the wall.

Food tracking means watching electrolytes, heart-related ones above all. Keeping my appetite in check is what macros are for; 40-30-30 was eye opening (carbs 40%). Water too. Lose it is the app I picked because of which micronutrients it covers.

If I had to narrow the KEY indicators to one, it would be HRV. It flags when stress has been running too long, or when illness is coming.

With a race on the calendar, mileage gets turned into a visual for motivation. Something of an x-factor: all these workouts exist, so today is doable too.

Weight lifting lives in Google Sheets, with my phone on me at the gym. Records are patchy, but my bench sits steadily at 6x 70lbs and as a F49 that pleases me. Programs can be preloaded on a computer and reached easily at the gym.

It really comes down to your goals. KPIs ought to predict whether a goal is reachable, or show what to adjust to get there.

As a fitness tracker, Garmin gets my adore. They've led that space for decades, and were among the prime GPS navigators before smart phones arrived. A 305 triathlon watch (circa 2006) was my first — killed by swimming with it on during a race … yes really. Water resistant enough to wash your hands, not waterproof. Their gear wears like iron, and they've had to diversify markets to keep growing because they are their own worst enemy.

Features are increasingly locked behind higher models, which annoys me on principle. Afib alert used to switch on for me but that went away from the 265. An incentive to upgrade, presumably.

With fellow techies around, AMOLED screens are beautiful. Screens can be downloaded in a myriad of styles, some carrying many data fields. Some cost nothing, some are a few bucks.

Garmin Connect holds every bit of my data going back to (guessing) 2006. Lamenting how fast I was in 2010-2011 is a regular hobby.

There's also RunningAhead, a throwback to 1995 software (in a loving sense) that's robust and also holds data forever.

Garmin had a position I applied for, and I fan-girled my way through the screening interview far too hard. One of the very few times I didn't get a call back lol. So yes, I know I can go on too much.

Their workouts span a myriad of activities, and what weightlifting I'm doing gets predicted pretty well.

Garmin was something I LOVED! My first real smart watch was the Tactics Bravo 3 lol. Prices kept creeping up, and back then something in the Garmin Connect app was giving me trouble, can't remember what the issue was tho.

Strength training also used to live in Google Sheets for me, but the strong app (free version) is just easier lol.

 

[islandtime50]

Garmins have been on my wrist for years. Total love isn't quite the word, what with the prices, the new pay wall, a few watches dying on me, and any touch screen wreaking havoc at work (things switch on, settings get changed, the watch had no idea what to do with tree climbing); bands have been ripped up in numbers, and leaning on something the wrong way is all it takes for abnormal heart rate warnings.

myfitnesspal has been on and off for years. This will sound really lame but the coloured container system that comes with BeachBodi turned out to be the best food macro system I've used. Simply easier, and it worked really well for me.

Both of them have had me in and out of love. The watch has sat shelved for months at a time, and food tracking has definitely not been constant over the years (we're talking decades now).