Some Background

Six years ago, I lost more than 40 kg (37% of me!) over a few months. I know what you are thinking: This sounds like the intro to a sleazy sales pitch. And it is. Just not for what you think it is.

While I am happy to talk about what helped me if asked, I am neither qualified nor interested in joining the legions of fitness influencers online. I also can not recommend many of the things I did. Overall, though, it has been one of the better choices of my life.

One thing that has consistently helped me to lose weight and manage it for years is simple, daily weight tracking. Every morning, at the same time, I weigh myself, log the weight and move on with my day. If, over an extended period, my weight is too high - I eat less. If it is too low - I eat more.

I used to do this with Google Fit. But then Google added more and more features. They added heart points (?), they added move minutes (??), they nagged me every day about how much I need to walk or exercise (???). Increasingly, they made it difficult to export my data.

Sadly, anything related to fitness or losing weight attracts idiots and scammers, so I could not find an app that just tracked my weight, nothing else.

Writing WeightBook

TL;DR: WeightBook is a local-only app to track your weight and exports to open file formats. You can try out WeightBook for free at https://weightbook.app/landing. :)

So instead of continuing to search for an app that does only what I want it to do, I took inspiration from home-cooked software and wrote it myself.

The ideal app should:

• Respect me and my time. It should not try to “keep me engaged” with notifications, gamification or similar. The less I use it, the better.
• Have no opinion on my weight. I don’t want to lose weight, and I don’t want to be judged by an app for my weight. I also do not need tips on how to diet. ¹
• Keep my data free. Apps come and go, but data is forever. I want to be able to use my data in other programs, back it up however I like, and take it with me to the next app.

The result is WeightBook, a progressive web app that you can install on your phone directly from your browser. It does nothing but track body weight and display basic statistics. The data is saved only locally, in a SQLite database in your browser that can be exported to SQLite or JSON. If you have data in Google Fit, you can import it from there.

Be warned: WeightBook is intentionally minimalistic and tries to minimize how much you think about it or your weight. For example, your weight is only ever shown as a whole number, rounded down. The intention is that it makes you worry less about the day-to-day fluctuations. You also can not decide if you enter kilograms, pounds, stones, or whatever else floats your boat - I assume you know what unit you track your weight in without an app telling you.

If you want to try it out, you can do so at https://weightbook.app/landing. Fair warning: While it is free to try, after a while you will need to buy access. WeightBook is not free because nothing in life is. I chose to align my incentives with whoever uses the app, rather than advertisers or data brokers.

Screenshots