What I track now (and what I stopped tracking)

Dear You,

I had a spreadsheet. Of course I did. Daily weight, a seven-day average, a column for how I felt on a scale of one to five that I never filled in honestly. Color-coded. Charted. Backed up. For about a year it was the first thing I opened in the morning and the last thing I thought about at night.

Then one morning in maintenance I opened it, looked at a line that had been flat for months, and thought: what am I doing. The number wasn’t telling me anything the mirror and my jeans hadn’t already said. The spreadsheet era ended that day. I archived it. I didn’t delete it; I’m sentimental about data.

Here’s what I pay attention to now, and what I let go. One person’s dashboard, not a recommendation.

What I stopped tracking

Daily weight. The scale is a noisy instrument and I was treating it like a verdict. A salty dinner, a long flight, a late night: a morning’s worth of noise, and I’d spend the whole day adjusting my mood to it.

Every bite. I never tracked calories formally, but I kept a running tally in my head, and the tally had opinions. It’s gone. The medication does the thing the tally was pretending to do, and it does it without commentary.

Streaks. Days in a row of anything. Streaks make a missed day into a broken thing, and I don’t need more broken things in my life. I need a Tuesday.

What I track now

Energy, in the plainest way. Did I wake up and want to get up. Did I hit a wall at 3 pm. I don’t score it. I notice it. If a week of low energy shows up, that’s information, and the first place I look is whether I’ve been eating enough protein and drinking enough water, because a quiet appetite is excellent at forgetting both.

Strength. I lift twice a week, nothing dramatic. The weights I’m using are the most honest numbers in my life now. They go up slowly. If they go down for a few weeks, something is off: sleep, food, stress. The barbell doesn’t lie and doesn’t care about my feelings, which is restful.

How the clothes fit. I have a pair of jeans and a shirt that I think of as the reference pieces. I don’t try them on ceremonially. I just notice when I put them on. They’ve fit the same for two years, give or take a big meal. That’s the whole report.

A weekly check-in, Sunday night, five minutes, three questions in my notes app. How did I eat this week, in a sentence. How did I move. What’s coming next week that might make either of those harder. The third question is where the value is. Knowing the Thursday dinner and the Saturday wedding are coming means I’m not surprised by them.

Why I weigh myself less, not never

I still step on the scale. About twice a month, in the morning, no ceremony. Not because the number runs my life, but because maintenance is a long game and I’d rather know about a slow drift in month two than month six. A number twice a month is a trend. A number every day was a mood.

I asked my prescriber about this and she agreed the pattern mattered more than any single reading, and we talked about what kind of change would be worth a conversation. That part, what counts as a change worth acting on, is a question for your care team, not for a blog.

The quiet part

The spreadsheet was never about the data. It was about control, in a season when I was afraid the whole thing could come undone if I looked away. Two years in, I’ve looked away plenty. It hasn’t come undone. The things I track now are the things that tell me how I’m living, not whether I’m winning.

Energy, strength, the reference jeans, five minutes on Sunday. That’s the dashboard. It fits on an index card. The spreadsheet is in a folder somewhere, color-coded, retired with honors.

Want to tell me something? Reply to any Low Volume email, or write to me here. I read everything.

Getting Quiet shares lived experience, general education, and practical tools. For medical decisions and individual treatment questions, talk with your qualified care team.