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Body Tracking for iOS; track your eating habits, not your calories

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 to keep my weight consistent after that.

The mere act of tracking makes us aware of our choices; having a history comes as a bonus and gives us perspective about them. Awareness influences our choices; perspective, well, increases awareness.

So I applied this 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 entrée we shouldn't have had). Then I started tracking stools, because why not (and because I have a sensible tummy).

After a year or so of tracking in plain text, I realized this system works, but it's really annoying to use, especially with so many emojis and how inconvenient it is to constantly change keyboards to add them (it's easy, but it does involve several steps).

I then 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 actual functionality for stool tracking;
  • 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 — these have to be, hands down, two of the features that greatly improved the quality of life of using the app.

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.

Their power comes when checking history: it's really easy to spot trends, to extract patterns and either congratulate yourself for an on-track history, or to course-correct in case of an undesired evolution. It's easy to neglect or to simply not notice isolated events/periods, but put everything together and in context, and now it's easy to spot the mistakes.

Now, after another year of working, tweaking, polishing and daily usage, I thought it's a good candidate for a version 1, so I released it.

I'd love to hear any kind of feedback/criticism/ideas; 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.

The app can be found here.

To celebrate the launch, I created a promo code giveaway (really easy to redeem, too!): https://tokn.co/c/4dzqARfe

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