I built my own weight management tracker app with Salesforce because I am broke.

The year was 2019. The whole world got a new normal; LOCKDOWN & WORK FROM HOME! Since then until this article is written in January 2022, nothing much different. Oh, there is one change for sure... My weight is increasing!. The term 'Corona-Kilo' hit on my face.

I heard about this weight management app called 'Naam' (not a real name). Basically, The app takes a behavioural approach to weight loss in order to “trick” my body into building healthier habits. Naam promotes their coaches — supposedly real people (though not registered dietitians) — who help me to set daily goals and keep me accountable. By monitoring my daily weight, first thing in the morning, aware of the water intake daily. How many calories do I consume every, and how many calories are burned from my daily activities. Trust me, there are many more! but I stick to these features only. However, when I look at the subscription cost; more than $100 for 1/3 of the year is a lot for a person who does not use all the features. So I decided to build my own app using Salesforce. Here are the feature's workarounds:

Daily Report Card

Based on my age, I need to consume not more than 1700 calories every day. This will make sure my body will have a calories deficit and later burn the energy from the fat stored in my body. My daily calories intake will be summed up on the report card.

I built a time-triggered flow that creates one report card daily. This process is important to make sure no human intervention towards creating duplicate records for one day.

Daily weight.

Getting myself on the scale is something I am doing every morning. I created a custom object called 'Daily Weight'. I keep track of my daily weight and formula fields to state my BMI and bodyweight category (underweight, normal, overweight, obese). I only record my weight daily. Therefore, I am supposed to store only ONE record per day. That mean, whenever I add a new value to my weight, the old value will be replaced. I create a flow to allow me to enter the weight directly from the home tab.

Daily Meal.

I created a custom object called 'Meal List'. All kinds of food's information are stored here: Meal Name, Food Type (Green, Yellow, Red), Calories (cal), Carbohydrate (g), Fat (g) & Protein (g). This information is basically for 1 meal serving. After creating 'Meal List' as the source of food database, I created another custom object called 'Daily Meal' where I store details such as Meal Time (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snack), Meal Name (lookup to Meal List) and quantity of serving. I created formula fields Calories calculated based on 1 serving calories detail stored in Meal List.

Workouts.

Similar data model with Daily Meal object, my daily workout records are looked up to 'Workout List' object. All workouts and calories burned information based on 60 minutes workout. There are a couple of formulas used in the flow to calculate the calories based on workout duration. All calculations happen in a record-triggered flow

Daily steps.

The process is simple, I only record how many steps I have made. On average every step we make, we burn 0.04 calories. How many steps in a kilometre? This website tells that 1km = 1312.3359580052 steps. The rest is just a simple formula in a screen flow.

Water intake.

I create a simple screen flow to count how many glasses of water I have consumed. By clicking the button, it will add 1 glass of water to the record.

Final Result.

After five custom objects, 13 multi-type of flows, 3 reports and 1 main dashboard later, I am now can track my daily health activity by using this app. However, I may not be going to use the dashboard as my information display as it is needed to be refreshed, and you can not refresh more than once in less than a minute. But hey it is a good start!