Apple Watch diary: Testing the power of data in meeting health and fitness

Apple originally positioned the apple watch like three things: productivity, communication, and fitness. While the device can help in all three areas, it quickly became clear that its main appeal was helping people achieve their health and fitness goals.

A few years ago, my colleague Zac Hall told an inspiring story of use apple watch data to lose weight successfully, and now I have decided to follow his example. I have several health and fitness goals that I want to achieve, and I hope that my health app the data will help me stay on track…

What gets measured gets managed

It’s truly amazing how much health and fitness data the Apple Watch (and iPhone) puts at our fingertips. In my case, I also have Quardio smart scales, which provide an additional set of data points.

My central focus is the old adage that “what gets measured gets managed”. Of course, you need the data to be front and center to be effective, which means looking at the data on a daily basis.

The Health app can display charts for a lot of data, but each one is separate, and I wanted all the relevant data to be visible at a glance. Unless someone can show me what I’m missing, there doesn’t seem to be a way to tell the Health app to export your favorite data categories, and I was in danger of getting kicked out of the Nerd Club if I just manually transcribed them.

What I decided was that I really didn’t need a bunch of numbers anyway. What I really needed was to use the numbers to generate a nice color coded board. Since I couldn’t fully automate the process, I decided to keep it simple.

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First, I split the data into inputs and outputs. The inputs were the things I had direct control over (such as how many calories I consume and how many I burn). The products were the end results. The metrics I have chosen to monitor are:

Tickets

calories in
calories burned
exercise minutes
Steps

Departures

Weight
waist measurement
body fat percentage
BMI
Resting heart rate

My Health and Fitness Dashboard

I created a spreadsheet, but instead of filling in the actual numbers, which would be tedious and difficult to parse, I simply decided to use the fill function to color code each cell. For the results, I used official government figures to define the bands, from poor (red) to excellent (green).

For the inputs, I set my own thresholds, and then green means I hit my goal, yellow means I got close, and red means less than that.

Then I finish with a true at-a-glance indicator of how well I’m doing in terms of my behavior and my goal. My first day looks like this:

This shows that I met all of my behavior goals; that my weight, waist size, and body fat percentage put me on the naughty step; my BMI makes me overweight but not obese; and my resting heart rate is in the ‘good’ range. My goal is to turn all output cells green.

Every morning, I’ll look up yesterday’s data in the Health app (plus my own log of calories burned) and it should take less than 30 seconds to update my dashboard.

The role of my Apple Watch

My Apple Watch, of course, collects a lot of data: calories burned, exercise minutes, steps, and resting heart rate.

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I’ve set Activity as one of my complications, of course, but I’ve set Activity as a second watch face, so I can slide in periodically throughout the day. I also have Cyclemeter and Workout as complications on that face to give instant access to them.

My iPhone also noticed that it seemed to take an unusual interest in my fitness metrics, which is why the Siri Suggestions stack appeared in the Activity card.

Health and fitness goals

As stated, my goal is to turn all output cells green. Some people rely on specific goals with deadlines; for example, I will lose X pounds by date Y.

I can see the appeal of that, and I have at least a general expectation about it, but it seems to me that it makes more sense to focus on the things I can control, the inputs, and let the outputs take care of themselves. .

However, I have set 100 days as an initial milestone, which is February 5th, and will report on progress at that time, if not sooner.