Life After Apple Watch: How I Track My Fitness Now. 18 minutes.
I stopped wearing my Apple Watch because I no longer needed it to track anything. That is the honest answer, and it is less dramatic than it sounds. By the time I took it off, three other tools had already quietly taken the job: a Whoop, a Renpho scale and Lose It. This is what each one actually does, and none of it is advice, it is just the setup that worked on me.
Whoop: fourteen days of battery, and a streak I did not mean to start
The thing that matters most about the Whoop is boring. The battery lasts around fourteen days, and it charges from a little puck that slides onto the band while you are wearing it, so in theory it never comes off. I take mine off in the morning for the shower, because I do not fancy it getting soaked and slowly starting to smell, and that is the only time it leaves my wrist.
That is the whole difference. No charger hunt every night, no gap in the data. The Apple Watch did not survive the Yorkshire Three Peaks. The Whoop did, and that walk is a decent part of why I stopped bothering with the watch for anything fitness related.
It is at 367 days of continuous wear now. Three numbers sit on the front screen, sleep, recovery and strain, and underneath that everything else, heart rate variability, resting heart rate, steps. Steps were the one that actually moved the needle early on, because the first target I set myself was simply 10,000 a day.
The screen I actually check
Whoop has a healthspan section that gives you a Whoop Age against your real one, and that is the single most motivating number in any of these apps. When I started, mine peaked at 43.8 while I was actually 38.5. It now runs at about minus 1.6 against my real age, and you can watch the line bend as the habits change. It also breaks down what is aging you and what is buying time back, so I can see that my strength sessions are worth about three tenths of a year and that my sleep consistency is the thing still working against me.
The strength trainer is better than the Apple equivalent, which surprised me. I have a full body phase two session saved with the reps and weights already in it, so I press start, pick a wrist, and it counts me in. During the set it shows live heart rate and which zone I am in, the set and rep I am on, and the weight, and if I have forgotten how a movement goes there is a video sitting one tap away.
Renpho: a £20 scale I have had for six years
The scale costs about £20 on Amazon and I have had this exact one for roughly six years, which makes it comfortably the best value object in this list. It measures body composition rather than just weight, and everything it records goes into Apple Health on its own.
The numbers are why I keep it. My first ever measurement on it was 1 March 2020, at 91.6kg. I started this properly on 19 February this year, a month after Luna was born, because that was the motivation, and I was 92.95kg. I am at 69kg now. Body fat over the same stretch went from 28.3% to about 16%, and the metabolic age it gives me is 33, which is a pleasant thing to read in the month before I turn 39.
I weigh myself twice a week, Saturday and Wednesday. That is the entire discipline. Weighing daily made me miserable and told me nothing a trend line was not already saying better.
Lose It: 198 days, and the part that adjusts itself
Lose It is where the food goes, and it costs me about £25 a year. I am on a 198 day streak, which is 27 consecutive weeks of logging, and I will be honest that some of those days were a lot more accurate than others.
Two features carry it. You can scan a barcode, which handles most of what is in the house. And you can photograph a plate and let it estimate, which is what makes eating out survivable. It is sometimes off, and I do not pretend otherwise, but an approximate number you actually record beats a precise number you skip. I logged a wedding meal that way.
The part that quietly matters is that Lose It reads the weight coming out of the Renpho scale through Apple Health, and lowers the calorie target as the weight comes down. You need fewer calories at 69kg than at 93kg, and I have never once had to work that out or update it myself. I also set my activity level to not active deliberately, so that anything I do shows up as a bonus rather than being baked into the budget in advance.
Why three tools beat one watch
The point is not that any one of these is better than an Apple Watch. It is that each is doing a job the watch was doing badly, and between them they need far less thought from me. The Whoop handles the body, the Renpho handles composition, Lose It handles intake, and all three write into Apple Health so the data crosses over without me moving anything.
What that buys is a free wrist. Once the tracking stopped living on my watch, there was no argument left about what to wear, which is how a twelve year Apple Watch habit ended without much of a decision. I took it further than most people will need to and piped screenshots into Claude and ChatGPT, then connected those to a private Supabase database so everything centralises regardless of which app it started in. That last step is a hobby, not a requirement.
The honest caveat: tools track, they do not do the work. The next thing I want to write up is what I actually changed, and some of that is going to be more debatable than a scale reading.
Related. The reason the wrist was free in the first place is twelve years of Apple Watches ending, and the cheapest way into what replaced it is a £15 Casio F-91W. The watches themselves live in Pulso, the collection tracker I am building.
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Full transcript
Lightly edited from the auto captions for readability.
I stopped wearing my Apple Watch because I no longer needed it to track anything. The reality is I had already moved my system over to three different tools, Lose It, Whoop and Renpho. In this video what I want to do is share with you each one of those tools, how I make the absolute most of it, and how it was beneficial in my journey of losing 24 kilos. Ultimately I want to work out what is actually worth buying, using, building and changing, then share what I learn.
Let us start with the Whoop. What is really good about Whoop is that the battery life is around fourteen days, and it comes with a little puck you can attach to it, so in theory you never need to take it off. I do take mine off every morning to go into the shower, because I think it is a bit odd for it to get all wet and then dry out and start to smell over a period of time. That is when I take mine off, but I find the convenience of being able to put the puck in really beneficial.
Here is the app. This is the main interface and you will find there are three core numbers. You have got your sleep score, your recovery score, and your strain score, and below it breaks down into more information. You can also journal. What I found most useful within the app is actually the steps, just being able to track and know the steps. One of the targets I set myself initially when I was trying to lose weight was to get around 10,000 steps a day in, so it does that really well. Then I can also understand my heart rate variability, resting heart rate and so on. In here it will feed in the weight when I weigh myself in Renpho. Renpho automatically connects to Apple Health, Whoop also connects to Apple Health, and all the data gets cross pollinated between the different devices, which I think is very good because it means you do not have to worry about it too much.
Then you have got your sleep and your strain. As you can see, some of my days of strain and recovery have been terrible, and that is one of the benefits of being a dad. You have got VO2 max and average heart rate. I typically focus on where I am at with my three rings. I have reached my strain target today because I did the strength trainer exercise this morning. Here is the bit I find quite motivating. I have now got a 367 day streak, I have been using this for around 367 days.
I want to go into health, and this is one I really want to share because I find it incredibly motivating. This is the healthspan, and it gives you what they call the Whoop Age. More and more of these fitness devices are doing this now. Apple does not, and I think the interface to get all this data is incredibly useful. In healthspan you will see my current Whoop Age and how much older that is than my actual age. Where I find it really useful is when I scroll down, I get a breakdown of what is aging me more. Green is where you want to be, and the more green you are the more age you make up. For example, sleep consistency, hours of sleep. The percentage at the top is where I am at the moment and the bar underneath is where it is averaging over the last period of time. With strain, you can see that it is actually not getting enough strain, so if I keep doing what I am doing I am going to gain 0.1 years. As I keep going down you will see that strength activity time weekly will actually help me lose 0.3 years because of the amount of time I am now spending on it weekly. That is obviously really helping.
If I keep going down to the bottom, this is where I find it incredibly useful and really motivating. Around February 19th is when I started my weight loss journey, and what you will see is that when I originally started this process I peaked around 43.8 years old when I was actually 38.5 at the time. What I found was that as I was losing weight, doing more exercise, and hiking, that hiking was another reason why I stuck with the Whoop, because my Apple Watch did not last the Yorkshire Three Peaks whereas my Whoop lasted and was there to track all the information. Being able to see that Whoop Age trend go downwards, you can see here where there has been a massive drop, where it went down to minus 1.6, and the pace of aging trend is really quite something. If I went even further back you would see an even steeper one from where I used to be. It got to around just over two and then it went down to just about minus 0.1.
The other thing that is really useful in here is if you go back home, you have got the AI, and within Whoop’s AI you can speak to it and it will give you loads of feedback. It knows that I did my full body phase two lift today, and that was really helpful for me to know I am getting back on track a little bit. If you want to create an exercise, I find the Whoop version of this so much better than the Apple version. You are already wearing it, and I wear it on my wrist, but sometimes I wear it on my bicep as well. To start an exercise you can just go to strength trainer. I have already pre-saved a full body phase two, I am currently in the recomposition phase, which I have created my exercise for, and in here you see all the different exercises you can possibly do, pre-saved with the reps and the weights. I actually have some physical weights that I bought and have at home.
From here you press start workout, you choose right wrist or left wrist, press continue, and it counts down to the start of the workout. Here is where I find a lot of value. First of all it gives my live heart rate and tells me what zone I am in. Some of you want to be getting into zone one or two and staying there, and that is the target you have in order to lose weight or get into better cardiovascular shape. Then you start the first set, and it tells you you are one of three sets. You have got the set you are in, the reps, and the weight. You can also go into the exercise and watch a quick video to remind you how to do that exercise. It also gives you your history, where you have hit your personal best, progress made. Then you end the set and it starts the new one, and you have got the rest countdown. You can change the order you want to do the exercises in.
That is a real quick crash course into what I think makes Whoop incredibly useful. As a way to track what you are doing, you forget you are wearing it completely, and because it lasts fourteen days you do not have to worry about charging it every single day like you have with the Apple Watch. You get no disruptions. The only thing you might get, by choice, is setting an alarm that vibrates, and even that will come up at a time you tell it, depending on where you want your recovery to be. It is honestly really good, and does a lot more than my Apple Watch used to do in that sense.
The next tool I want to talk about is Renpho, which I have been using for a long time. This is to track your physical body composition. I actually have two different versions, this Renpho and one called the Morpho scan that goes into a lot more detail, but for the purpose of this video we will stick to the standard Renpho. These smart scales only cost about £20 on Amazon.
If I go into my trends, this is what I want to share, because I find it quite motivating. I can go all the way back to my very first measurement, which was on the 1st of March 2020, where I weighed 91.6 kilos. I started on the 19th of February this journey that I have been on to lose weight, and I know it was the 19th of February because Luna was born on the 19th of January and I wanted to start this a month after she was born, because it was a real motivator for me to get back in shape. So on the 19th of February I was at 92.95 kilos in terms of weight. My goal was to get to around 79 initially, and then I realised that actually I wanted to work on my body fat percentage, so that was revised and came down when I hit it. My target at the time was to get to around 75, and that was the 10th of May. It was pretty fast and pretty aggressive.
This gives me a really great understanding of where my body is at. I now know that I am at 69 kilos. If I go to the trends of the things I really care about, body fat percentage, if I go back to the 19th of February when I started this journey, 28.3. At the moment, according to this Renpho scale, I am at 16%. Equally I want to track things like my metabolic age. It is currently at 33 when next month I turn 39. So this for me is a really great app, and again it synchronises to Apple Health, so all that data goes in there and all these different apps can speak to each other, I do not have to do anything. What I do is weigh myself twice a week, on a Saturday and a Wednesday. Really simple, really powerful.
Lastly I want to talk about Lose It, the other app I have used to help me with tracking. In the dashboard you can track roughly how much headline weight you have lost, weekly average rate, milestones that you hit, and your streaks. I have a 198 day streak, which means I have done 27 consecutive weeks of every single day doing my absolute best to track. Some days are harder than others. You have got calories, the macronutrients, the calorie bonus, protein, fat, and then inside the log is where you log your food and your intake. To begin with I was incredibly disciplined with logging everything to do with water, but over a period of time, when I lost the weight, that was no longer as critical to me. In Discover it is just good content they share, and they have groups where you can talk to people, and friends you can track.
I pay about £25 a year for this and I think it is a really great investment. My current target is just to maintain the weight. One of the great things it does is if you put in your current weight and your goal weight, it will calculate for you how many calories per day you should be taking, and you can put that within your budget. I have adjusted my budget by a hundred calories less because I am still trying to lose body fat percentage. On the calorie schedule I have it so the weekends have a bit more calories than the week. You can also set things like your level of movement and your level of activity. I keep mine as not active because I wanted any activity to be bonus calories. To give you some context, if you set your level of activity to somewhat active, that is about 8,000 steps a day. This all feeds data from Apple Health.
If I am really honest with you, the way to track your information should be relatively effortless. One of the things inside Lose It that I find incredibly valuable is that I can scan the barcodes. I can also take a photo and it will use AI to give me approximates, which is incredibly useful when I am out eating. It sometimes is off a little bit, but it gives you something to go off, which allows you to track. Recently I was at a wedding and I went out for a meal, and this is a really great way to track what you are eating, because the eating piece is really important. The fact that it synchronises with the Renpho scale weight also means that as your weight goes down, the calories you need also go down, and Lose It automatically adjusts for that.
With the Whoop you can track your physical activity and your sleep, so you can see how I have built those three systems to allow me to track everything, which then means I can wear a watch that I enjoy, or you just have an empty wrist and you are perfectly fine. For me that is a really great system. To be honest with you, I took it a step further by taking screenshots and adding them into Claude or into ChatGPT, I actually use both for different reasons, and then I connected Claude and ChatGPT to Supabase, which allows me to save all that data into a private database. So it does not matter where I go or what apps I connect, as long as it connects to Supabase everything is centralised and then you can get really personalised feedback. That is a whole different thing which you do not need to do.
That is my system, and I find that by doing that I am able to track everything I need to track. Step one is having the right tools, and step two is having the right strategy and making the right decisions. I definitely made some bad decisions as I went through this, and that is what the next video is going to be about, the journey that I went through to lose weight.
So this is why I stopped using an Apple Watch. It just was no longer necessary for me. I got everything I needed from the system that I have now. It feels a lot more accurate, and it requires a lot less thought from me to manage, a lot less interruptions. And it allowed me to really get into this watch journey without any conversations, without any questions, because I already did not need it as much. Thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video. Ciao.
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