Where is the fitness tracker that's right for me?

July 16, 2020 9:51 PM

I've had great success in health gains over the course of a year by tracking multiple parameters of my fitness in a non-triggering way, via my gym's proprietary app. Now I'm leaving that gym and I need some new tool to help me. Parameters inside.

Here's what I need. I'll start with my absolute must-haves:

#1: A way to track my food, loosely. Right now a typical log is like "8am: steel-cut oats. 12p: turkey and spinach." That's exactly how much I log -- I do not want to log portion sizes, calories or any other macros. It's essential that I do not have to be dealing with those things because they can be super triggering.

#2: A way to track my exercise intensity. I have a Fitbit and a MyZone heart rate monitor. Using either of those is fine.

Beyond that, some bonus abilities would be:
-- simple sleep tracking, like allowing me to write in yes/no (did I hit my sleep goal) or the # of hours
-- simple stress tracking, like allowing me to rate my stress level or the like
-- simple water tracking, like did I drink enough water today

I downloaded My Fitness Pal but immediately got overwhelmed by how much is there, and also I'm not seeing the ability to not track calories/portion sizes. I linked my Fitbit but don't see a way to link the MyZone monitor.

I'm happy to pay for the right app. I use IOS. Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.

posted by BlahLaLa to Health & Fitness (5 answers total)

What about tracking some of these metrics yourself, in a simple Google Sheets/Excel spreadsheet that you could access from your phone? That could work well for food, sleep, stress, and water. And you could note down the exercise data that your Fitbit/HRM outputs.

Recently I've been moving away from app-based solutions and back to self-made spreadsheets. Apps aren't very customisable (thinking of your no-calorie requirement in particular); they only seem to survive a few years before being taken over, shut down or changing beyond recognition; and there are often real problems with accessing and exporting your data. Spreadsheets are free, they last forever, and all your data is yours.
posted by Klipspringer at 3:47 AM on July 17, 2020

MyFitnessPal will definitely track portion sizes, calories, macros, etc. Even if you decided to just input defaults and not use the features (the details are often beyond a scroll or in a different tab), it lists calories next to everything, including exercise, and also adds flags like "this food is high in X!" or "you met your Y goal!" to your diary entries. And the first page that opens each time often has dieting/weightloss-related content all over it. I Do Not Recommend it for your needs. Hypothetically some of that might be customizable if you had the premium version (I've never used that) but the whole ethos of the app/website/community is just not what you're looking for and I'd worry that even if you got it to a point you could tolerate, new auto-on, opt-out "features" might cause very unpleasant surprises in the future.
posted by teremala at 5:31 AM on July 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

Do you use the "Health" functions on Apple iOS? You could record heart rate, steps (fitbit), sleep, and water in there in predefined functions. You can integrate it with other apps, maybe the things you are already using. I don't see a function for stress but there may be a way to add. Regarding food, it sounds like a Google doc might be the way to go - it sounds like a journal that you may want to access from multiple devices; Google docs is easy for that.
posted by Mid at 8:31 AM on July 17, 2020

If you're open to decoupling food from exercise, Ate might be a food-logging app to look at. It has logging features for "mindful eating" (e.g. how the food made you feel) but those aren't compulsory & it doesn't track numbers at all.
posted by mosst at 9:50 AM on July 17, 2020

Best answer: Updating this to say that I've made Fitbit + MyFitnessPal work. What helped was someone encouraging me to use MyFitnessPal with no judgment -- just put the data in; don't judge it. That has helped make it useful to me.
posted by BlahLaLa at 10:01 AM on September 12, 2020 [2 favorites]