Losing the weight took a combination of both diet and exercise, of course, and food tracking with Apple’s HealthKit feature really helped. User could use MyFitnessPal to log their meals.

It helps you set a daily calorie goal and automatically subtracts calories burned from exercise measured from Apple Watch. If your calorie goal is 2000 and you eat 2300 calories in a day and burn 350 calories from exercise, then you’re still in your goal.

HealthKit support means data that you input in MyFitnessPal can be shared with Apple’s Health app, too, which can become a wealth of information as you collect more data.

Dieting has been much tougher than exercise for me, but I don’t think I would be motivated to do one without doing the other. Because I was logging workouts with Apple Watch and completing my Activity Rings, I felt motivated to improve my diet as well.

“I’ve been a junk food eater for 25 years (and growing up on Southern cuisine hasn’t helped), but in April I gave up soda and sweet tea for water and unsweet tea and started drinking my morning coffee black. I also traded snacking throughout the day and oversized fast food meals at the end of the day for consistent and more considered breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.

The trick to dieting for me has been to go easy on myself. I used to eat junk food all the time and occasionally have a healthy meal but that didn’t make me healthy. Now I try to eat better every day and enjoying junk food in moderation doesn’t define my diet.

Meal logging sounds like a lot of work, but you probably eat the same foods routinely plus MyFitnessPal and similar apps have nice databases of nutritional information for lots of foods. This has also helped me be more thoughtful about my eating habits. If I couldn’t put a number on my eating habits, I might severely overestimate how much I’m eating and diet all wrong. Instead, I can see when I have room for a Pokémon Go frappe without missing my goal.

It’s the same story for Apple Watch fitness tracking. It’s key for me to be able to gauge how much effort is enough without going overboard and thinking I have to do something unsustainable to be healthier.”

His family photo in December 2014 and December 2016:

Source: 9TO5Mac