Apple Numbers Fitness Tracker

Screenshots

Daily Table

Sample charts

Monthly table and charts

Background

I developed an Apple Numbers spreadsheet to track my health, fitness, and diet. I did this after I migrated from a Fitbit to an Apple Watch in 2018, which takes full advantage of Apple’s Health and Activity apps. My main purpose was to keep myself accountable, but also raise my awareness—plus I’m a bit of a data nerd.

The sheet tracks overall stats, activity, workouts, diet, and habits (good and bad). While this needs to be manually entered daily, it offers a richer analysis of your data and places it front-and-center and in context with one another, rather than buried in the Health app. By filling out the sheet daily, it gives you an awareness of your daily, weekly, and monthly progress (or if you need to step up your efforts).

Daily Tracking

Activity Charts

The activity charts sheet contains visual representations of your move, stand, and exercise data. These charts are all aligned vertically so you can compare them to one another with time on the horizontal axis. When appropriate, lines indicate goals and averages for a particular item. See the notes below on how to alter these.

Diet & Heart Charts

Charts on this sheet track your weight, blood pressure, resting and walking heart rate, frequency of alcoholic (or sugary) drinks, calories, and macros.

Monthly Tracking

The Monthly sheet contains a table at the top which will populate automatically from the daily sheet data. All monthly numbers and charts are generated automatically. Below the table are a series of graphs on your stats, diet, and activity where you can see your monthly progress, or if you need to kick it back into gear—we all have off months. But, note that the numbers in the table and data in the graphs are not always accurate until the month has ended. Some averages will be skewed by assuming empty columns in the month are zero.

Some notes:

Vacations:

I tend to color the cells on vacation days in a sea green. And, I make boxes on my chart sheets to represent them vertically. The sample ones are locked, and can be altered by going to the Arrange panel and pressing the Unlock button. To make the green boxes, I populate fake data in my first and last day of the vacation, and scale my box to those data points, then I can delete the fake data once the box is in place.

Net Calories:

Note that net calories should be deleted if you are missing any one of resting, diet, or active calories in your sheet. Without all three of these, net calories is a meaningless number.

Pale blue columns:

All columns in the Daily table with a light blue shade are calculated automatically. Do not fill in values here, or delete them. (Numbers still cannot, to my knowledge, lock a cell, so these remain unprotected (be careful!).

Zero Rings:

One-, two-, and three-ring days are automatically computed, but if you have a day where you achieve none of your rings (we all get the stomach flu), you have to enter a “1” manually in the appropriate column. This is not to add to your shame, I just couldn’t find a way to compute this in Numbers (perhaps someone out there knows?).

Boolean data type:

In case anyone is wondering, a boolean data type is one that is either true or false. We represent true with a “1” and enter nothing for a false value. You could enter a zero for false, but it only makes the sheet more cluttered.

Colored data values:

I’ve used data coloring in some of these columns that reflect whether a number is under or over a goal. I find these to be a bit buggy in Numbers. To change these coloring rules, choose the column in question, in the Cell formatting tab you’ll see a Conditional Highlighting section, with a button to show all highlighting rules. You must choose only the body cells in the column in order to see the rules in effect and change them. If you choose the entire column with its header and footer rows, it won’t be able to parse the rules and will ask you to combine them.

Chart scale:

On some charts, like weight, you’ll need to choose a range that is appropriate for your data. You can do this by choosing the graph, in the Axis formatting tab and the Value (Y) subtab selected, enter values in the Min and Max fields, and a Major step that works for you. If you clear all these values, Numbers will choose a scale it thinks is appropriate.

Chart goal lines:

The horizontal lines in the charts that represent your goals should be adjusted to suit your needs. Do this by putting in some fake data that exactly matches your goal, then move the line to that level. Once the line is properly placed, you can delete the fake data.