My Tools

The Tools I use

I use a number of tools to keep track of my progression.  In my opinion, this was one of the most important things I was doing with my life, so I didn't exactly skimp.

First off, and most importantly, I use Lose It! on my iPhone to track what I eat.  And Lose It! leverages Apple Health.  To keep everything centralised and managed, I sought out everything that could report into Apple Health, and Lose It! can draw out those details in one handy tool.

Lose It! is excellent for reporting on foods, because it has official and crowdsourced databases of foods, based off their name, brand, and even their UTC bar codes.  Not always correct (Canadian versions of many foods seem to be different from their American counterparts by the same name and UPC code), but they're easy to correct.  Got a new food, scan the barcode, check the details, and select the quantity based on the scale.  Get a report every day on my calories, fats, proteins, and so on.  Everything I have, including coffee with a couple shots of skim milk, gets logged.

Apple Health isn't perfect; probably my biggest rage at it is that it is not supported on an iPad or a Mac computer, ONLY the iPhone.  

I bought a Withings Body+ scale to augment Lose It! and Apple Health.  Weight, BMI, Fat %, Water %, Bone mass, heart rate.  It even can show you the previous day's steps and today's weather prediction.  I had another scale that was swell, but I was crap at actually recording the weight in Lose It!.  Lose It! can pull the Withings weight details out of Apple Health, making Lose It! even more central to my efforts.

I started buying more stuff to augment my Apple Health portfolio.  

I bought a Withings Thermo to track my temperature (mostly checking for a pandemic fever).  This was kinda impulsive, but with the pandemic, I wanted the insight and because whenever I went out on cooler days, once I got back in, I always felt like I had a raging fever.  Turns out, my fingers are crap at checking for fever when they're cold; my temps have always been perfect.  I also discovered I had an anti-masker uncle and well, I wanted to keep watch for a fever that would also get recorded automatically.  

Always wondered about why I get tired mid-day and wondered if my glucose levels were involved, so I got a One Touch Flex glucose meter (no, I don't have diabetes) that logs over BlueTooth to Apple Health (and gets tracked by Lose It!).  (and no, blood sugar has no relation to my desire for afternoon naps!)  

I track my sleep with my Apple Watch series 5, which also populates Lose It!.  Heck, the Apple Watch is fantastic for tracking a lot of things, including my workouts.  The Apple Watch was an impulse-buy when I was in Alberta in February 2020; figured I wouldn't be wearing it much in the motorcycle season, so getting it during Winter would be the most useful.  In the end though, I wear it also on the motorcycle, despite it slightly interfering with my jacket cuff, and it doesn't get hopelessly confused when I'm riding the motorcycle, thinking I'm scaling Mount Everest like my Fitbit always did.

I bought a Renpho smart tape measure for bodily measuring, which prompts me for which part of my body I'm measuring, and auto-populates its app with the tape measure results. and submits at least a few supported measurements to Apple Health.

I bought an Etekcity Smart Nutrition food scale that _can_ log to an app on my phone.  Unfortunately, that app doesn't integrate with Lose It!, so I just use it as a regular scale and manually enter portions into Lose It!. 

For cooking, once I started eating real foods again, I picked up a Cosori Smart Wifi Air Fryer XL.  I got a _screamin'_ deal on it from some perfectly timed sale.  It also uses VeSync that my Etekcity scale uses.  It can notify me when things are done, or even just that the shrimp needs shaking.  Very handy, and very healthy.

Next:  Starting on Fitness.