Keeping It Simple
There is no shortage of apps, tools, and programmes promising to help you track, manage, and optimise your weight loss journey. We have tried a fair few of them over the past two years, and our toolkit has settled into something fairly simple – which is usually a sign it is actually working.
Happy Scale for Weight Tracking
Happy Scale is the app we use for tracking weight, and we genuinely recommend it to anyone who weighs themselves regularly post-op. The reason it works so well is that it does not just show you today’s number – it calculates a moving average and shows you the trend over time. Weight fluctuates daily based on hydration, food volume, hormones, and a dozen other factors, and looking at raw daily weigh-ins can be misleading and demoralising when the number goes up for no obvious reason.
Happy Scale smooths out that noise and shows you the underlying direction of travel. On days where the scale has crept up slightly, you can see that the overall trend is still downward. That visual reassurance matters more than it sounds in the early months when every fluctuation feels significant.
We both weigh in most mornings. Not obsessively – just as a data point. The goal is to notice trends rather than to react to single readings.
Food Tracking
Neither of us tracks food with the rigour we did in the early months. In the first six months or so, logging everything we ate was genuinely useful – it made the protein targets visible, helped identify where calories were creeping in unnoticed, and built an understanding of portion sizes that has stuck even now we track less formally.
At two years post-op, we eat intuitively most of the time and use tracking as a check-in tool when something feels off or when weight starts drifting in the wrong direction. If you are newly post-op, we would encourage proper tracking. If you are further along and finding it adds anxiety rather than insight, it is reasonable to ease off while keeping an eye on protein.
What We Do Not Use
We have tried fitness trackers, macro calculators, sleep trackers, and various bariatric-specific apps. Most of them added complexity without adding clarity. The tools that stuck are the ones with a single clear purpose – weigh in, see trend, adjust if needed. The ones that fell away were the ones that required significant time investment to maintain and gave back information we were not sure what to do with.
The honest answer is that the most useful tracking tool is a reliable set of blood tests every six months. Numbers on a screen are not a substitute for knowing your actual nutritional status.
Sources
NICE CG189 – Obesity: identification, assessment and management
BOMSS – Guidelines on the peri-operative nutritional management of bariatric patients
NHS – Weight loss surgery: what to expect afterwards
About this content
This blog is written by James and Kirsten, a couple from the UK who had gastric sleeve surgery together in March 2024.
We started this blog because we couldn't find any sources of content that details before surgery, the surgery and then life post surgery - so we decided to write one ourselves.
Everything on this site is based on our own experience and the research we have done along the way. It is not medical advice. Gastric sleeve surgery is a serious procedure and every patient's journey is different. Please always consult your own bariatric team or GP before making any decisions about your health or treatment.
Some posts on this site may contain featured or sponsored content, or affiliate links. Where this is the case, it will always be clearly stated at the top of the article. Our opinions are always our own.
Publish Date: 18 February 2026 | Last Reviewed: 7 June 2026 | Next Planned Review: 7 December 2027