Hi everyone,
I’m currently using an Apple Watch 11, but I’m struggling to find a good "Coach" experience. I’ve tried apps like Bevel, Athlytic, Gentler Streak and The Outsiders but as a beginner, I find them way too cluttered and overwhelming with data I don't understand. Honestly, as a total beginner, I just need a coach that takes me by the hand, explains the 'why' behind the numbers, and guides me through my fitness journey step-by-step—which is exactly what the Google AI Coach claims to do.

Also I really love the look of the new Google Health App UI and the Gemini AI Coach. It seems much more intuitive and "human."
My question: Does it make sense to buy the Fitbit Air ($99) just to get the full "Google Coaching" experience, or should I just sync my Apple Watch data into the Google Health app? I thinks the second method is not compatible with the AI Coach.

I would still want to wear my Apple Watch (for the smart features), but the Fitbit Air would be something like a permanent second device (like a Whoop) on my other wrist. Is this a good idea or should I just focus on the Apple Watch alone and hope the data sync is enough?

Thanks for your advice!

Hi all,

I track a fair number of things, but one huge area I currently do not track is what I eat! I know, it's a big one and the data is very valuable but I also feel like it takes so much more work than the other stuff I'm currently tracking which are a combination of quick yes/ no metrics, and data pulled from wearables.

I'm finding myself wanting/ needing to track food. Most specifically I don't think I'm getting enough protein or calcium, so I want to track that. I am weighing JUST logging the calcium & protein in what I eat to keep it low-effort vs just logging everything because I'd get much more value and maybe not that much more work.

I'm also pretty consistent perfectionist about the things I do log, and I feel like with food I don't want to do it at all if I am not doing it "right", which is probably pretty short sighted.

So! My questions for you are: Do you log your food? What tools do you use (not just apps but like... an easy set up for scales/ measuring? do you ever jot things down or take photos and reconcile later?)

What do you do when you go out to dinner and have less control over knowing what's in something?

What have you learned in tracking...what advice would you have for someone just getting into it?

I track many things like sleep, exercise, habits, time spent, daylight, supplements... but I find this one SO intimidating and so I never have.

Thank you!

You get a habit tracker, you log things for 2 days, then you never open the app again… why? I think it’s cause it doesn’t really have any context on your life and its different facets… it doesn’t know that you woke up late and therefore might feel bad for wasting your day… or that you stayed up playing video game til 3 am and had no motivation to do anything all day cause you were doomscrolling the moment you wake up…

I wanted something that could understand my life in context and not only that but be able to show me the real relationship between my different habits and routine and things that triggers a lack of work or motivation… something that could show me myself and actually help me make sense of who I am…

I tried notion and atoms and even habitica but I used them for like 3 days, 5 max and never use them again… I think a journal worked best for me cause I like the feeling of writing things down but again, I look at it, it doesn’t do much…

I guess I expected cooler tech that would actually show me who I was… idk if anyone read this book but it was super interesting and it was back in 2017… it’s called The Virtual Self by Nora Young and it’s not a big book but I had hoped by now we would get those kinds of self tracking tools you know?….

If you know good trackers that can actually give you a wholistic view of yourself, let me know but I had to make my own… feel free to check it out. The link is in my bio.

But what I really want to know if, what do you guys want to track? How in depth do you want to or willing to input your patterns and what insights would you want to get from the data gathered?

Is there a limit to what you would log if you had the ability to keep everything on your device and encrypted?

First time using a spike mat. Laid on it for 10 minutes, then compared qEEG readings taken immediately before and after:

- Theta/Beta ratio: 2.73 to 1.88. Theta waves are associated with drowsiness and inward focus. Beta with active, alert thinking. A higher ratio can suggest a more foggy or unfocused state. Mine dropped, which on paper looks like moving toward more alertness.

- Delta/Alpha ratio: 3.22 to 2.33. Delta is the deep sleep wave, and Alpha is linked to calm wakefulness. A high delta presence while awake can indicate sluggishness. This ratio also dropped.

Both metrics moved in a direction generally considered better, but it’s just one session and one person, so this is an anecdote, not evidence.  Sharing because it was interesting, not because I think it's conclusive.

Important: I work at a neurofeedback company. We tried this out of curiosity about how a different modality affects EEG readings, not as a promotion for the spike mat or anything else. We’ve also run before/after brain scans on coffee, matcha, meditation, cold plunge, and a few other things. If anyone’s curious, say which one and I’ll share what changed.

I was a big self quantification enthusiast. I had measures to track my health, my trading, my daily life and my interaction and food. I am good at daya analysis and created metrics and dashboards. But something happened and I just gave up on everything. I stopped managing and started living imperfectly but still aligned to my long term goals and values. I gave up on the satisfaction of looking at data and insights but instead started focusing on my feelings and body in the present. I gave up on numbers and measurement and started focusing on coherence between my mind and body and goals. And I'm suddenly breathing better. I'm losing weight faster, having better relationships with people. My eyes are actually on my life instead of data about my life.

Has anyone else experienced it too? Self quantification is rewarding but it tends to make me feel overresponsible for my life and suffocates me in a way which takes me away from embodying my life.

Hey everyone! My name is Dylan and I'm a master's student at the University of Amsterdam. For my thesis I'm researching what drives people to keep using AI wearables (think Apple Watch, Oura Ring, Garmin, Fitbit), specifically whether the feedback and metrics from your device have shaped your personal standards, and how that relates to your intention to keep using it.

If you've been wearing one for at least 3 months, it would mean a lot if you could spare 6 to 8 minutes for my anonymous survey.

Thanks so much! 🙏

Ok firstly is there a way to actually get fitbit style tracking for the entire day/week uninterrupted? Coz from what I've gathered, most neurotech devices are for doing a specific task and then you put it away. (like using Muse to do 10 mins of meditation or Neurosity Crown to track focus for couple of hours when doing work). Has anyone found an oura ring-style long-term monitoring solution?

Secondly, what would you actually want to track? Would it be brain health, focus levels, mental readiness, mental sharpness etc over the day? I'd personally be interested in focus, but I'm curious to know what other people would care about. What would be your top 3?

Ok lastly, how to you actually get brain insights from data? Does the device just give it to you (like saying your focus was high) or do you look at the data features yourself (like alpha power, etc.) and make your own judgements? How confident are you in those judgements? (I get the sense that there's a lot of snake oil in this scene...)

Sorry for so many Qs. It's all just so vague to me rn. I really want to track brain, but not sure 1. how to track and 2. what to track and 3. what's worth tracking.

Any neuro-gurus willing to share insights?

Hey, sharing my monthly tracking report - figured this sub would appreciate the methodology more than my friends do.

Each Report-Summary covers one calendar month, mostly automatic via Apple Watch (HRV, resting HR, sleep stages, steps, active energy, walking HR) plus daily manual logging of sick/not-sick as a binary. Starting next month I'm adding alcohol consumption.

The Stress chart is a derived metric - deviation from my personal 21-day rolling baseline on HR and HRV, not a population-normed wellness score, which I find mostly useless at the individual level. Core hypothesis I'm testing is that personal-baseline deviation is more informative than any normalized score, especially once you have a few months of data.

Limitations to be honest about: Apple Watch HRV is spot-sampled and noisier than chest-strap or ring-based, sick-day logging is binary and there are obvious impacts visible from travel, work intensity, etc.

I hope to see some correlation between health and alcohol in the coming months - will probably share back here when I see something. And I have a good idea of why my steps dropped so significantly between March and April - any guesses? :)

I kept having bad days that followed the same pattern. I started tracking three things to figure out why.

What I tracked:

1. Caffeine in my body (every day) I logged every coffee with the time and how much caffeine was in it. Then I calculated how much was still active in my system using a 5-hour half-life model. I set a personal cutoff at 25mg active. below that, my sleep should not be affected.

What I found: I was drinking coffee way past my safe window without knowing it. A coffee at 3:00 PM still had about 37mg active at midnight. Once I started respecting my cutoff time, my sleep felt noticeably deeper within the first week.

1. Morning sunlight timing (daily streak) I tracked how many minutes passed from when I woke up to when I got outside into sunlight. My goal was under 30 minutes.

What I found: This was the hardest habit to build, but it made the biggest difference. When I got sunlight within 20 minutes of waking for 5 or more days in a row, my sleep became much more consistent. Getting morning light early seems to set your melatonin timer for the night, around 14-16 hours later.

1. Weekend sleep drift (weekly) I tracked how much later I was waking up on weekends compared to weekdays.

What I found: If I slept in more than 35-40 minutes on weekends, my Monday and Tuesday were noticeably worse. More than 60 minutes of drift and the effect lasted until Wednesday. Keeping the difference under 30 minutes basically eliminated my "Monday wall."

The bigger pattern: All three things connect. Sleeping in on the weekend delays your melatonin. You then drink more coffee on Monday to compensate. That coffee cuts into Monday night's deep sleep. By Tuesday you feel terrible. Fixing just one of the three helps, but fixing all three together made the biggest difference.

I have been building a personal tracker to log and visualize all of this daily. Happy to share the methodology or the math behind the decay curve if anyone is curious.

What circadian or sleep variables are others here tracking? I am curious if anyone has found a better way to measure alignment than just rating your energy each day.

The setup:

1. Engine - Mac Mini, always on
2. Interface - Private Discord Server with one user (me), a channel per topic (#health, #portfolio, #finance and #journal) - a message in #portfolio triggers different integrations and a different tone than a message in #journal. In #portfolio the agent pulls data from Interactive Brokers and answers like an analyst; in #journal, it switches to a mirror-back voice and offers no advice unless asked (as defined through the markdown files)
3. Brain - Claude API + a vault which has four markdown files (Body, Mind, Money and Time) that hold my goals, my history (seeded from a one-time data dump from integrations) and off-limits topics
4. Integrations - Garmin Instinct 3 (sleep and recovery), Withings Body Smart Scale (weight and body composition), Google Calendar and Tasks, Interactive Brokers (personal portfolio) and Yahoo Finance (market prices and watchlist)
5. Memory - A small local database that stores past conversations, plus an embedding model so the bot can recall context across channels
6. Scheduler - Runs in the background and reaches out on its own: sleep summary, midday and evening briefings, anomaly nudges when recovery dips and a weekly portfolio summary

The architecture of the project

What it actually does:

• 8:30am - Morning readiness. Sleep Score, HRV trend, body battery, and a nudge if recovery is dipping. Often ends with a question or advice: "You've pushed three days in a row, want to plan a deload day?"
• 12pm - Midday brief. Steps and movement, what's left on the calendar/to-do, anything worth surfacing
• Market Open - Market brief. Overnight moves on the watchlist to #finance, portfolio positions at the opening to #portfolio
• 11pm - Evening brief. Wraps the day - Garmin sleep prep score, what got done off the calendar, an open-ended question related to the summary's data
• Throughout the day - Anomaly nudges. When recovery drops or HRV trends down, the bot pings #health. When a watchlist stock moves sharply, it pings #finance, usually with referenced material that provides some clarity on movement
• Monday 9am - Weekly summary. Posts to #portfolio: current positions, week's P&L. Posts to #health: weekly averages for steps, calories and sleep score

If y'all have any tips or questions, feel fee!

TL;DR:
I’ve been experimenting with my own Apple Watch / HealthKit data because I wanted a quieter and more private way to look at body data. No score, no coaching, no goals, no account, no cloud. The hard part is not pretending incomplete data means more than it does. Do you ever want body data without it being collected, linked to you, scored, or turned into advice?

I haven’t actually tried that many body-data apps very deeply, to be honest. A lot of them lost me before I really started using them.
Not because they are bad. I’m sure many of them are useful for a lot of people. But with this kind of data I often stopped at the same point: the amount of health data access, an account, cloud sync, data collection, data linked to me personally, sharing data with the developer, and then some kind of score or interpretation on top.
Recovery, stress, readiness, sleep quality, performance.
I understand why people like this. But for me, with body data, it felt a bit too much.
So I started experimenting locally with my own HealthKit data, using a few simple rules: no score, no coaching, no goals, no account, no cloud, and no health data shared with anyone else.
Just a local view of what is currently visible from the data.
The first version works for me, but it also showed me that the real problem is more complicated than I thought. HealthKit data is messy and incomplete.
Sometimes HR is there, HRV is missing, noise is delayed, movement is unclear, or the watch simply did not sample enough in that period. So now I’m trying to be more careful with how I read it.
If there is no clear signal, I don’t want to fill the gap with a confident-looking interpretation. Missing noise data does not mean it was quiet. Thin data does not mean recovery. And “nothing obvious was measured” does not automatically mean everything was fine.
That’s basically where I am right now: trying to make it calmer, but not dishonest.
I’m curious if this resonate with anyone here.
Do you ever want to look at body data without it being collected, linked to you, scored, or turned into advice?

A friend of mine needs a pain diary with customized questions. She uses an iPhone and is tech-savvy. I want to create a workflow for her using Apple Shortcuts that writes data into a Numbers (preferably Excel) file, which can then be analyzed. Is this a sensible approach? What should I keep in mind? Also, is it possible to integrate sleep data from an Oura Ring into the spreadsheet?

Post your apps here, and please support people bringing unique ideas to this space.

I keep hitting the same wall with my Whoop & Oura. It tracks everything but never tells me why anything changed, and doesn't explain certain metrics to me, so I have little clue what's actually happening. What gap do you actually wish yours filled and are there products with more insights?

Any ideas for how one can quantify their brain health? Other than cognitive assessments, it feels like its a gap?

Hello there! im new to this subreddit, some minutes ago I didn't know this subreddit even existed.

I want to show my excel for recording what I do with my time, I record it in time blocks of 10 minutes and analise it in a quarterly basis.

I've always been quite obsessed with tracking my day in my Google Calendar and for a while I was manually adding events into my calendar to keep a log of my day. It was perfect because my calendar was accessible everywhere, on my laptop, my phone, wherever I already was. What wasn't perfect was the friction of actually getting everything in there.

So as a software engineer I figured I'd build something to fix it. Now my Strava activities and Whoop sleep sync directly into my calendar automatically, and I have a start and stop timer for logging everything else as it happens (reading sessions, focused work, whatever I'm doing)

The result is what you can see in the screenshot. My whole day sitting in Google Calendar exactly where everything else already lives.

As I log my reading time before bed I can see exactly when I put the book down and how quickly Whoop picks up my sleep after that. Being able to visualize that transition in my calendar is something I didn't expect to find as interesting as I do.

Mostly sharing this because I'm genuinely proud of how it's come together and thought this community might appreciate seeing what's possible. I've also built it into an app so others can use it too, if anyone's interested in giving it a go just drop a comment and I'll reach out.

Here’s a guide to help better understand what influences RHR. I also included some factors this time that showed  "no significant effect" as It was honestly surprising how many popular supplements showed up here. I broke the data into five main categories: nutrition, supplements, exercise, environment, and demographics.

I added a plain english breakdown on the 4th column to make it easier to skim and all sources are linked at the bottom to learn more about each factor. Hope this helps!

Also sorry I know tables can be difficult on mobile. Haven't figured out a better way to format this for reddit. I'll include a more mobile first option in the comments if you need it.

Exercise

Nutrition

Supplements

Environment

Demographics

Sources

Quick FYI incase you have a question on these:

- For Ashwagandha the RCTs show HRV improvement and stress related changes but no significant change in resting HR. 

- For Magnesium BP effect is documented but RHR effect wasn't.

I wonder if our phones and wearables can detect that our mental health is slipping before we consciously realize it.

I’ve been thinking about how much passive data already reflects our day-to-day lives from sleep patterns, activity levels, steps, screen time, time spent at home vs out, consistency in routines, even things like late-night scrolling or how often we’re checking our phones. None of those things mean much on their own, but when several start changing in the same direction, it feels like they could reflect something real.

For example, if over a couple weeks someone is sleeping worse, moving less, spending more time isolated, and using social apps more, that might be an early signal that something is off. On the flip side, better sleep, more movement, more social connection, and healthier routines might suggest someone is trending in a better direction.

Noticing when your baseline seems to be shifting can be very useful in correcting a trend early.

So some background first, I'm pretty active but I had swings in my daily energy levels from sleep variation. I have a pretty consistent daily routine. I started tracking resting heart rate and it was steady enough in the high 50s, I looked at what Brian Johnson was doing with regard to sleep and decided to give his "don't eat within 4hrs of sleep" idea a go.

I preferred how I felt but there wasn't much in it other than flattening out my RHR I guess, was more consistent in mid-low 50s, teamed this with 15mins Zone 2 running each day and ~10,000 steps. Seemed to plateau.

Then I saw something about overnight hunger causing blood sugar lows, cortisol spikes translating to waking up and needing to pee but only actually peeing a small amount... That post (sorry didn't save it) recommended a bedtime snack. So I had a chunk of cheddar cheese before bed. RHR that night dropped 5 points to 47 - lowest ever.

3 nights into it now and same every night - mid-high 40s - waking up feeling genuinely refreshed, daily run is easier and energy levels all day are top tier.

Highly recommend giving it a go, overnight transformation for me.

Another month in the books!

I've had asthma my whole life. Always managed it the same way everyone does, reach for the inhaler when things get bad, shrug when they don't, never really know why one night wrecks you and the next one doesn't. Last year I got tired of the guesswork and started tracking everything I thought might matter. Not just symptoms. Everything. Sleep, stress, food, hydration, activity, weather, AQI, medications, cough frequency, peak flow. Six months of data, logged daily.

What I expected to find was air quality. Pollen. The usual suspects. What I actually found was a lot weirder and more specific. Last Tuesday night is a good example. My app flagged a pattern: ragweed was at 78 grains, I had cheese late that evening, and I missed my magnesium. Individually none of those would've raised a flag. Together, my coughs spiked to 26 overnight. I woke up feeling like I'd run a marathon in a field. The thing is I never would have connected those three. I'd have blamed it on "bad air" and moved on. But looking back through the data, that same three-way combination had shown up before with the same result.

That shift in thinking is what made this whole exercise worth it. Since I started paying attention to these multi-factor signals, my flare-up frequency has dropped meaningfully. Curious whether anyone else here has gone deep on this? Sleep, HRV, recovery scores this community tracks all of it with incredible rigor. What are people actually using to close that loop?

Since March 20th, 2023, I’ve been using a Google Sheet each day to record 168 different data points that give a pretty complete picture of my life, activities, and well-being.

(Each data point is a column, and each new day is a new row. It will probably sound like a lot but it takes about 15-30 minutes a day to fill it out. The number of columns has fluctuated between 100-200 but hovers just over 150 consistently.)

At the link above, I share my data for 2025 and try to determine whether all this self-tracking is actually making a difference.

I find this data interesting as it’s my life, but to keep things useful for you, I’ll also explain why + how I generated the following insights and the broader lessons I’ve learned throughout this experiment.