I’ve been tracking my hydration for a few weeks now, so I thought I’d look back and see what my baseline is so I can work on how to increase my water from there. One “small” hitch.. the app I’m using (Plant Nanny, because I like the idea of watering cute little plants each time I drink a glass of water) apparently only give the exact ounces you drank today and for past days, it just shows bars filled in based on how close I got to my goal but doesn’t share the exact number so I have to “eyeball” it. Change in habit #1 – find a better app. Sorry, cute plants.

Tracked hydration

So, without being able to see the exact numbers, here’s my best guess at how I did based on how those bars are filled in..

Day of week	Date	Water consumed (oz)
Saturday	June 26	34
Sunday	June 27	51
Monday	June 28	33
Tuesday	June 29	25
Wednesday	June 30	59
Thursday	July 1	Did not track
Friday	July 2	25
	July 3-7	Did not track
Thursday	July 8	34
Friday	July 9	42
Saturday	July 10	51
Sunday	July 11	42
Monday	July 12	51
Tuesday	July 13	51
Wednesday	July 14	25
Thursday	July 15	25
Friday	July 16	42
Saturday	July 17	68
Sunday	July 18	51
Monday	July 19	51
Tuesday	July 20	59
Wednesday	July 21	42
Thursday	July 22	59

Insights

1. On average, I drank about 40oz of water per day.
2. Starting with the first full week I was tracking, my daily average went up each week (35.5oz, 42.25oz, 44.71oz, 52.75oz). My takeaway here is that simply tracking and being more aware has given me a boost in hydration.
3. Saturdays are my best hydration days (with average of 51oz)
4. Fridays are my hardest hydration days (with average of 36oz)

Finding a new app

I have a few problems with the current app I’ve been using including:

1. Doesn’t show exact numbers for past days
2. Doesn’t let me manually set a water goal (they set a goal based on weight and physical activity)
3. Reminders are every hour, on the hour rather than based on when I last recorded a drink
4. Slight scolding for drinking too much water at once if I happen to log multiple glasses of water back to back (which 100% of the time because I’m logging a glass I *just* drank as well as one I had awhile ago and never recorded)
5. No ability to see patterns in when I typically drink water

Not wanting to pay anything for something I could just keep track in a spreadsheet or notepad, my options are somewhat narrow. For some reason, it seems like almost every water app only offers regular reminders on the hour vs when you last had water, so given my budget, I decided that’s a low priority item.

I ended up going with Water tracker by Amila, which has the following features I like…

1. Shows number values for past days
2. Allows manual setting of water goal
3. Doesn’t judge me for how much water I log in one sitting
4. Offers charts and averages so I can better visualize my progress
5. Allows me to see times when I logged so I can see if I do better at certain times than others.
6. Has a progress bar that shows me how much I should have consumed by this time if the day
7. Shows me a progress bar of how much I’ve consumed today plus a visual marker for how much I *should* have consumed by now if I were drinking water evenly throughout my day to reach my goal.

Next steps…

I’m going to finish out the month continuing to just track and for the month of August, I’ll start looking into where I can start adding glasses of water to boost me towards my goal.