Hello,

Technically, it is possible to have fitness software associate your
results with different things, like meal sizes. Open Fitness actually
has this capability for exercise, supplement usage, and also for diet
somewhat. It can look at a period of time where your progress rate
increased (for example, you started losing weight faster), and tell you
things that changed in your workout or supplement usage patterns.

It's hard to remember, off the top of my head, but here are a some of
the things it can check for...

Increased/decreased calorie, protein, fat, or carb intake
Starting or stopping any supplement
Increasing/decreasing the dosage of any supplement
Increasing/decreasing workout length
Increasing/decreasing workout volume (number of sets and/or reps)
Adding new exercises to your routine

Open Fitness can only check what you log, so obviously if you're not
tracking your diet, it's not going to be able to check your calorie
intake.

The way this works, is Open Fitness looks at all of the items I listed
above for a given time period, and then compares it all with what you
were doing just prior to that time period (uses it as a baseline). It
then finds the differences and shows them to you.

All of this is under Progress Journal. It's what that 'Why' button
does. We really need to document it better, but it's kind of hard to
explain this functionality, which is why it's not documented very well
at this point.

It's important to point out that there is a big difference between
cause and correlation. Open Fitness will give you changes in your
workout/diet patterns that apparently correlate to you getting
stronger, losing weight, etc. But, this DEFINITELY does not mean the
things it comes up with are the real cause of your change in progress.
You have to use your best judgement there.

Matt


LurfysMa wrote:
Matt,

You posted a helpful reply to a message I posted some time ago, so
I'll ask you, as the author of a fitness program, to comment on this
re Open Fitness. I'd appreciate hearing from anyone else who knows
anything about this, too.

Can fitness software learn about how my body works and get better and
better over time at advising me what to eat and how much to exercise?
It seems to me that it the software tracked things like how hungry I
feel, it might be able to figure which foods or combinations of foods
do a better job of keeping the cravings down. Or whether I do better
with smaller meals, etc.

Does Open Fitness do anything like this?

Or is this a useless effort?

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