Zero

Over the past few months I've had to take a serious look at how my health has been affected by an intense, incredibly stressful but also very sedentary career in journalism. The tale of it is basically told in a weight chart I've kept for 14 years. It essentially began climbing the day I got made co-editor of TechCrunch and never stopped for the next 10 years.

That took a huge toll on my health and I finally started to do something about it recently. I'll detail more of the ways that I did that here, because of course I went deep. But I did want to call out one thing that has helped me plant a figurative flag in the ground since the day I decided to get healthier: Zero.

It's an intermittent fasting tracker and motivator that has been around since 2016. Originally created by Kevin Rose then acquired by Mike Maser of Big Sky Health, it is now being run by Tom Conrad. The latest version of the app is quite good and works very well with Apple Watch and plays nice with Apple Health signals like sleep, active minutes and other signals.

Though it tends to paint intermittent fasting as a sort of panacea, rather than a small component of a positive behavioral and health shift that has to also encompass nutrition, it does a bang up job of keeping you mindful about food intake. I started my fitness sprint off with 16 hour fasts tracked in Zero which got me going and really thinking about when I needed to eat.

I did about 60 days of that, then dialed back to 13 hour fasts when I started doing regular strength training and rebuilt my hip mobility and flexibility enough to actually 'work out' work out. This has allowed me to fit more protein in during the day by starting to eat a bit earlier. But it's not unusual for me to easily hit 14 or 15 hours casually now without being hungry - which is a product of the change in macros I know, but also a nice result of having gone hard on Zero at the beginning. I'm down nearly 50lbs since day 1 and I credit Zero as a part of that.

Like the baby and parental world, the fitness world is full of really terrible software. I know, I'm so annoying about the software that I use daily that bad design is actually a de-motivator for me. A crappy interface can literally make me unhealthy because I just won't use it habitually.

If you're also annoying like me and you're looking for something that does a great job at tracking your fasting while also being design forward and that connects to the rest of your regimen through Apple Health, try Zero.