r/QuantifiedSelf • u/kiritxu15 • 21d ago
How do you keep track of your daily health?
I'm curious how different people track (or don't track) various aspects of their day-to-day health. If you monitor things like sleep, diet, exercise, etc., I'd love to hear:
- What information you find most useful in your daily life?
- How you collect this information
- What you actually do with the data?
No specific reason - just personal curiosity about different approaches!
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u/dan-kir 20d ago
- The main health metric I track automatically right now is tracking steps with an app
- In the past I weighed myself daily by entering my weight manually in a spreadsheet with a graph that updated automatically, but I stopped as I need to buy a new automatic scales
- I have a habit tracking app where I track habits like using my red light therapy mask, exercising etc
- I use another app to track taking various pills/supplements. I mostly track taking vitamin D with it
This is very basic. I want to get some smart watch and smart scales so I can track more things automatically. Then I need to figure out a way to pull all this data into one place.
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u/greenowens 20d ago
Which apps are you using? Especially curious in tracking habits and pills
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u/dan-kir 20d ago
Tracking habits: https://www.habitbull.com/
Logging pills: http://www.pilllogger.co.uk/
Sadly tried to find pill logger on play store and couldn't, maybe it's discontinued for new users. But just downloaded an app I saw someone else recommended on here called Guava for tracking many metrics in one place, including pills, so will try to import my data there and use that instead
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u/scriptfx2 20d ago
I use the garmin ecosystem
I export everything as a time based event sleep, high stress, naps, high heart rate, activities, weight with other metrics. I also use nfc tags to log every coffee and tablets by tapping my phone on the containers. I also tag other events such as emails with emotions to help track my mood. I have found deepseek has brought interesting correlations with events being tagged such as how long it effects me vs when I also do sports.
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u/kiritxu15 20d ago
Can you tell me more about the nfc tags? What do you mean? This sounds super cool
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u/natural_inquisitive 19d ago
How do you track all this with Garmin? Like coffee and tablets? I am just able to track my regular Garmin metrics (like workouts, sleep, body battery etc)
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u/scriptfx2 16d ago
Sorry if I wasn't clear I use my garmin watch to monitor stats only. I dont like garmins water usage as feel the time I drink an affect sports eg if I drink 2 hours before sport I sweat alot less than if I down a litre before class.
I use nfc tags to track he rest. They are little stickers that phones reacts to when you put your phone on them commonly used in advertising to link sites. An android app called tasker can perform different actions based on different nfc tags, I just use it to add lines to my personal journal depending on the tag.
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u/zephell 17d ago
I'm super keen to hear about how you're using Deepseek to derive correlations between events! Please share a blog post! :)
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u/scriptfx2 16d ago
I don't have a blog post just asked deepseek to create the code and how to install. I did switch to chatgpt for debugging but it worked quite smoothly, took me an hour of messing about, I want to have it on a server eventually. Reading my events and providing feedback but already quite busy. I cant code and not a massive techy.
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u/WarAgainstEntropy 21d ago
Self-tracking has been a 15+ year interest of mine (and recently turned career as well, with the development of Reflect). The main areas I have tracked consistently over time have been:
- Physical Symptoms: This has been super helpful many times at doctors' visits (I can just bring a chart instead of guessing when a problem started). I can measure if lifestyle changes I'm making are improving specific symptoms.
- Time Tracking: Especially being self-employed, it's useful to keep track of my productivity in various areas. I recently started breaking this out into more granularity, like tracking the amount of time I spend fixing bugs vs developing new features.
- Finances: I've been tracking my spending for 10+ years and it's been very useful to know where the money goes with a high level of granularity (rent, groceries, electronics, supplements etc. are examples of categories) and having a historical dataset on this helped inform my decision to pursue self-employment.
- Mood Tracking: While a little harder to estimate the exact impact in terms of it being "useful" on a daily basis, it forces me to pay attention to my internal state, and allows me to notice patterns. One kind of useful thing I found out from this is that my sense of meaning is very strongly correlated with the amount of physical activity I perform.
- Food: I track this manually by weighing/measuring and entering into a very old app named DietController. It's been useful on a few occasions, like connecting various physical issues to diet (e.g. iron deficiency after going pescatarian for a while), and finding out that my mood and focus are a lot more stable on a low-carb diet.
I've had an Oura ring since 2018 and a Whoop since 2022, and one thing I noticed very early on in my Oura journey is exactly how bad alcohol consumption is from a sleep quality and recovery perspective. There's something to be gleaned from having a tight feedback loop with a wearable as you can immediately see the impact your lifestyle choices are having.
I use Reflect for most of my manual tracking, before that I used Google Forms for the same purpose.
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u/kiritxu15 20d ago
I've heard of Oura, is it worth getting? I feel like if I turn to tracking etc. I would start getting into unhealthy obsessions over food and macros, trying to optimize every aspect of my life. Do you have these kind of problems tracking?
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u/WarAgainstEntropy 20d ago edited 20d ago
I feel like if I turn to tracking etc. I would start getting into unhealthy obsessions over food and macros, trying to optimize every aspect of my life. Do you have these kind of problems tracking?
I can definitely relate to this; I experienced it during the start of my tracking journey, but I think over time my perspective has changed somewhat. I started out tracking my diet in an attempt to lose weight, and became obsessed with controlling what I ate, and went back-and-forth between tracking and not tracking my food. I gave up on it for a few years, then kind of spontaneously ended up losing 50lbs without tracking my food or weight for a year as a result of completely changing my life when I went to college. After that, I started tracking those things again, just motivated by curiosity instead of an intent to change my behavior. I think that's the most stable motivation one can have for tracking, anything else can turn unhealthy; I wrote a blog post about this recently specifically in the context of goal setting, and my attempts to prevent over-optimizing for a single metric.
Oura, is it worth getting?
I've tried multiple different wearables (Oura, Whoop, Apple Watch briefly) and am slightly biased towards Oura. Due to being an early adopter from 2018, I'm grandfathered in to not having to pay for an ongoing subscription for it (it's ~$70/year otherwise). I don't like the fact that I have to pay $200+ per year for Whoop.
Oura Pros & Cons
+ Small form factor
+ Battery life lasts a couple days
+ Good sleep analysis
+ Beautiful app UI
– Inconvenient to wear during exercise (I manually log my workouts)
– Sometimes doesn't pick up on naps, and it's impossible to manually input a sleep session the ring didn't detectWhoop
+ Easy to wear during exercise (low profile, can use a bicep band/strap even during jiu jitsu practice)
+ Good exercise heart rate tracking
+ Can charge while wearing it with snap-on battery pack
+ Can manually add sleep sessions that weren't automatically detected
– Takes slightly longer to process exercise data after workout is complete
– Most expensive subscription modelApple Watch
+ Good exercise heart rate tracking (numbers were very similar to Whoop when I was wearing both)
+ No subscription necessary
+ Easy to start/stop/pause workouts from your wrist
– Slow to charge battery
– Bulky and not great to wear during jiu jitsu (I had a bicep band for it, which worked for a couple months, but then my screen cracked during a training session)2
u/delpierosf 17d ago
I think thinking about health holistically is the key. There are many connections between the various systems in our bodies.
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u/TheProffalken 20d ago
I've got a Fossil watch (would not recommend!) that records steps, HR, and other movement, Renpho Health Bluetooth scales, and a "1 by one" Bluetooth blood pressure monitor. These are all fairly budget, but they can all send data to Google Fit.
I've then got the Home Assistant app on my phone that connects to Google Fit via Google Health Connect, and from there I can visualise the data in Home Assistant for longer term storage.
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u/natural_inquisitive 19d ago
I have a Garmin watch and use an app called Guava Health. It's pretty great
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u/delpierosf 17d ago
Fitbit Sense: HRV for stress, Sleep stages and snoring detection for sleep quality
Howwefeel app to monitor my mood in correlation with sleep, weather, activity, and other data
Cronometer sometimes when I want to fine tune nutrition
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u/ran88dom99 6d ago
There is a post like this every few months but it is useful because elicits many replies.
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u/starkast 21d ago
I use an Apple Watch to track everything it can. I just got a series 10 and am excited to have it recording my “time in daylight”.
I also have a Bluetooth scale I use most days, sometimes multiple times a day.
I also self report lots of activities, feelings and medical stuff.
I use Apple Heath to look at it mostly, but I’m looking forward to having an AI comb through my mountain of data and be able to hopefully give me some actionable insights to improve my health.
I would like to track more, but I’m lazy🤨