Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I record my weight every day using my Apple watch and then export that data to a spreadsheet. I'm a big fan of recording your weight daily as a way to provide yourself with good data to figure out when you need to cinch in a bit and when you can let a little loose. I have a video on regulating your weight with MyfitnessPal if you are interested in that.
When I was much younger, I didn't have the healthiest relationships with my weight, but after many years I've come to the conclusion that weighing yourself daily (in a non-obsessive way) helps to desensitize you to the fluctuations in your weight that are totally normal AND makes you more accepting of the weight range that you fall into. So that means weighing yourself the night after eating Chinese food when your body is retaining 4lbs of water from salt intake AND weighing yourself when you have just come off of a stomach bug. Weighing yourself everyday -- including through holidays -- is a good way to be accountable to that number on the scale. The point is, you should accept the weight that you are daily and accept that it fluctuates pretty regularly 5lbs in either direction based on weigh-in timing and what choices you've made recently. You should have a sense of this fluctuation so that you don't beat yourself up when your weight goes up a fraction of a pound.
So, I'd like to say that I am absolutely militant about this and weigh in every day. But to be honest, I have struggled a bit to make this happen. I thought about getting one of those wifi enabled scales that syncs to your phone and records your weight every time you get on the scale, but $100 seemed like a lot to spend on a smart scale.
Input through Apple Watch
Here's what works for me -- since I don't carry my phone around all the time, I like to record my weight using my Apple Watch, which is generally attached to me. If I can record using my watch, I will actually do it every time I step on the scale. I had a Workflow programmed to do this for a while, but then with the introduction of Siri Shortcuts, Apple did away with its integration with the Apple Watch, so I've been casting about for another solution.
So, I now use an app called Watch Weight. It's a free app and as soon as you install it on your phone, the Apple Watch app also becomes available. Just make sure that you wait a bit for the phone and watch to communicate with each other and then within the Apple Watch app, under Start Weight Tracking, you make sure Show App on Apple Watch is turned on. I would prefer to have it come up as one of the options for my modular watch face, but it doesn't, so I have to be okay with pushing the wheel to get to all of the watch apps and selecting it from there. You'll notice that I moved it to be close to the center of the apps, so I don't have to scroll down to get to it. Once you select it, it takes a couple of beats to be prepared to take input -- this could just be that I have an old watch -- and then you put in your info and hit Done to save it.
Export Weight Data
I like that this app saves the data in the app and then has the ability to export. Unfortunately, I couldn't get this premium export feature to work properly. But here's what I figured out -- it automatically syncs data with Apple's Health App. Now, Apple also doesn't give you the ability to export data from it's app, but there is ANOTHER free app that can help you do this. Download QS Access which allows you to export all kinds of data from the Apple's health app. I switch the row to 1 Day (since I only record once a day), scroll down to weight and turn that on, and then hit create table. And there is it -- all of my entries since Christmas Day 2015. Now I can hit the share button and send this table by email, but I chose to copy it to Google Drive. It shows up as a csv or comma separated values file, but you can choose to open it with Google Sheets, which converts it to a spreadsheet. Now, don't ask me precisely what I'm going to do with this information, but I felt very limited having it in the Health App with only a couple of ways to view it. This way I can create my own graphs, take averages, or determine what times of the year are the most problematic for me.
Let me know what you think! Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!
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