I bought a Pixel watch almost 6 months back; I wanted to do some sleep tracking and keep track of my steps during my weight loss. I've consistently worn it to bed and understanding my physical state has been helpful.

The watch comes with 6 months of Google Health premium. It's got an AI feature and leans a little far into it, recommending what days to work out, which to take it easy, commenting about late-night eating... it's gotten a little tiresome.

I'm going to let the Premium account expire in a few days. I wonder, though - do we really need that much tracking in our lives? Do I need my watch to tell me that I shouldn't have had pizza at 11:00pm and should have gotten to sleep instead of finishing up work? There's a level of self-awareness that should suffice once you have a basic understanding of your body.

I think of an old saying in IT - don't measure what you're not going to track. The only metric I'm keeping records on is weight. Perhaps that, plus a dose of self-awareness is enough?

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Re: Health Tracking...
By: poindexter FORTRAN to All on Sat Oct 17 2026 04:27 pm

I bought a Pixel watch almost 6 months back; I wanted to do some sleep tracking and keep track of my steps during my weight loss. I've consistently worn it to bed and understanding my physical state has been helpful.

The watch comes with 6 months of Google Health premium. It's got an AI feature and leans a little far into it, recommending what days to work out, which to take it easy, commenting about late-night eating... it's gotten a little tiresome.

I'm going to let the Premium account expire in a few days. I wonder, though - do we really need that much tracking in our lives? Do I need my watch to tell me that I shouldn't have had pizza at 11:00pm and should have gotten to sleep instead of finishing up work? There's a level of self-awareness that should suffice once you have a basic understanding of your body.

I think of an old saying in IT - don't measure what you're not going to track. The only metric I'm keeping records on is weight. Perhaps that, plus a dose of self-awareness is enough?

My wife used to wear a Fitbit for a while and mainly used it to track steps and sleep. I bought her an Apple Watch a couple of years ago and we were both surprised how much she loved it and she got much better tracking of steps/calories and sleep duration/quality. No subscriptions.

I've had sleep issues (apnea, RLS) for quite a while and was intereted in a sleep tracker but didn't like the idea of a watch (especially one that has to be recharged daily). My wife got me an Oura ring last Christmas and it's been great at tracking my sleep and activities (sometimes it blows my mind at how accurate its guesses are the actual physical activity) and I only have to recharge it once a week!

The biggest lesson I learned from my tracker: I consistently get about 90m less actual sleep than time in bed, even though I fall asleep very quickly. So if I really want to get 7-8 hours of sleep (I feel much better when I do), I actually need to be in bed closer to ten hours, which I never accounted for previously and was consistently sleep-deprived during the work week.

Do I really *need* the tracker? No, but I do think it's helped and as the technology improves and we get more metrics and fidelity, they'll just get better and better (and become more indespensible) over time.

I certainly would miss my tracker if I didn't have it. Much more so than my VR headset. :-)
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Re: Health Tracking...
By: poindexter FORTRAN to All on Sat Oct 17 2026 04:27 pm

I think of an old saying in IT - don't measure what you're not going to track. The only
metric I'm keeping records on is weight. Perhaps that, plus a dose of self-awareness is
enough?

I had a FitBit years ago and found it helpful for encouraging me to get up and move and keeping track of my activity over the day, but even moreso the app that helped me track my eating habits. I lost a fair bit of weight by diligently tracking what I was eating in the app. I also used it for the sleep tracking function and that was somewhat helpful.

I don't remember why all I stopped using it; I think part of it was just enshittification of the app. I have often thought about finding another tool or workflow to track just what I care about locally, without ads or subscriptions.

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Ben wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

I had a FitBit years ago and found it helpful for encouraging me to get
up and move and keeping track of my activity over the day, but even
moreso the app that helped me track my eating habits. I lost a fair bit
of weight by diligently tracking what I was eating in the app. I also
used it for the sleep tracking function and that was somewhat helpful.

Journalling is good, I use the FitBit/Google Health app mostly for
that.

I do like the Fitbit reminders to move at least 250 steps an hour. I
work at a desk and it's a nice reminder to get up and move around a
bit.

My wife wants to start tracking her sleep, heart rate and movement, but
she's not a watch person. I got her a Fitbit Air, we'll see if she
takes to it.

I'm using the free version of the Fitbit/Google Health app now, I let
my Premium subscription expire. It seems to capture what I want without
an AI coach. I get a pop-up in the morning saying "take it easy today,
you didn't sleep well" instead of suggesting specific activities based
on the weather or what I've told it I want to do. And, that's fine.

One thing I didn't use a lot was the AI food logging - you could take a
photo of your meal and it would estimate the calories/nutrients.

I don't remember why all I stopped using it; I think part of it was
just enshittification of the app. I have often thought about finding another tool or workflow to track just what I care about locally,
without ads or subscriptions.

For food journalling, being online helps to look up a database of
foods. I was a Weight Watchers user for years (lost 75 pounds in
2000-2001) and liked the points systems. Their systems got more complex
and more costly, and they cut way down on the meetings, which helped a
lot.

I found an app called Healthi that duplicates a lot of what WW did,
including points-based food tracking on some of the old WW plans, as
well as some of their own. The app is $25/year, which feels pretty
cheap - and they have a good foot database to pull from and a user
community. They, like a lot of apps, have a feature where you can scan
a barcode with your phone and pull up the nutritional information of
packaged foods.




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