A new way to track your eating, by focusing on your habits
Last year I was writing an article about the importance of tracking something. What gets measured, gets improved!
The mere act of tracking makes us aware of our choices; having a history comes as a bonus and gives us perspective about them. Having awareness influences our choices; having perspective, well, increases the awareness.
I created Body Tracking because tracking what I eat, marking food as good/bad/etc and checking my history was one of the main ways I managed to lose 40+ kgs and keep my weight consistent after that.
So I applied the above concept to eating and I started tracking what I eat in a text editor, then I started adding various emojis to food that I considered was unhealthy, for example sweets, carbs, or eating too much (we all know that extra entree we shouldn’t have had).
After a year or so of tracking in plain text, I realized I’m an iOS developer and I could’ve made my life easier long ago, so I decided to make an app:
- replaced emojis with color coding;
- added tracking of fasting times (unlike other fasting apps, Body Tracking simply tracks the time, it doesn’t “create a fast”);
- added a proper history which makes it really easy to extract patterns from;
- added weight data from Apple Health and fasting info on history, to better correlate actions with results;
- created widgets and watch complications to track fasts.
The colors can mean literally anything you want, they don’t have to mean good/bad, for example, for me green means vegetables and red means sweets; but red could very well mean meat and orange could mean dairy for someone trying to become a vegan; or red could be that food that you know gives you issues, so you can corelate it with your stools.
Now, after another year of working, tweaking and polishing, I think it’s a good candidate for a version 1, so I released it. I’m all ears in regards with feedback, I’d love to know how to make it better and what’s currently broken.
Other features are already in the pipeline, or scheduled for a later point, like tracking water intake, adding weight from the app, graphs, better statistics and more.
To celebrate the launch, I created a few promo codes: https://tokn.co/c/MX5fftKv. You can find the app here.
Hope you’ll like the app, but more importantly, I hope it helps you reach and keep your health & weight goals.
