If you're data-inclined, it's a powerful tool to drive health and fitness. Extracting actionable meaning from your data isn't that hard, as long as you understand the basic mechanics of what you're doing and can compute things like percentages and moving averages.<p>I'm 34, spent the last ~15 years at sedentary desk jobs, and became quite out of shape. I've lost 70lb over the last year doing little more than just logging what I eat in MyFitnessPal, sticking to caloric and macro budgets, and recomputing my TDEE based on moving averages of my caloric inputs and weight readings. I lift for 45-60 minutes 4 times a week, no cardio.<p>In that same time period, I've started lifting and seen excellent progress (bench 1RM ~260, squat 1RM ~320, deadlift 1RM ~465), again by thoroughly logging my workout data and using that to identify where I'm weak and strong (which lets me select exercises to improve my weaknesses), to help set and adjust training maxes, and to help set achievable goals on a daily basis. Symmetric Strength is a great tool here - it's incredibly gratifying to see my progress presented in several ways, and it helps me understand my strengths and weaknesses, as well as my progression relative to others, which can be very motivating.<p>I attribute just about all of this to the fact that I adopted eating and lifting plans which were based on data collection and specific goals and targets to reach for and hit on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. I've tried dieting and fitness regimes in the past that were basically coached as "just do this and try really hard", without laying out why, or what I could expect at a granular level, and those become really discouraging once the initial hit of motivation wears off. By contrast, having a year's worth of data to analyze any time I start to feel discouraged provides immediate reinforcement as to what does and doesn't work, and helps keep me on track.