FitDIYWhy FitDIY exists
I'm getting married in the fall of 2028. I'm 28, six feet tall, and when I started this I weighed 239 pounds — a former high-school athlete coming back from a long sedentary stretch. The plan is to be around 199 by the wedding: forty pounds over two years, deliberately slow, under half a pound a week. Not a crash diet. A system.
The training is a mix — weight lifting, running, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which I'd just started. And when I went looking for an app to hold all of that together, everything I found wanted three things from me: a subscription, an account, and my data. The features I actually needed — barcode scanning, calorie targets that adapt to real results, a proper training log — were paywalled in one app, split across three others, and every one of them phoned home.
So I built the tracker I needed. Then I shipped it, free, for anyone who trains the same way.
The principles it encodes
FitDIY isn't a generic tracker with my logo on it — it's opinionated about how a long cut actually works:
- Trend over noise. On a slow cut the scale lies to you daily. Weigh-ins become a smoothed trend line, and the daily number gets out of the way. The trend chart is literally the app icon.
- Adherence beats precision. Logging has to survive the brutal weeks — barcode scans, favorites, and a photo scanner get a meal logged in seconds, because a log you abandon is worth nothing.
- Training is more than "workouts." Lifts with double progression and RIR, runs and intervals, and BJJ sessions with rounds and intensity are different things, and the app models them natively.
- Recovery is part of the program. When a Thursday roll, Friday lift, and Saturday roll stack up and soreness climbs, the app flags it instead of cheering blindly.
- Motivation needs more than one number. When the scale stalls — and on half a pound a week, it will — PRs, run times, photos, and session reflections carry you through.
Why it's free
FitDIY has no backend. Everything runs and stays on your phone, which means another user costs me nothing — so there's nothing to charge you for. No investors, no ads, no subscription, no data collection (that's the App Store privacy label, not a slogan: Data Not Collected). If the app helps you, there's an optional tip jar inside. That's the whole business model.
The wedding cut is underway. The app you can download is the one I'm using for it, every day.
Say hello
Questions, bugs, feature ideas, or your own progress story — I read everything: emalenchek@gmail.com
And if FitDIY is working for you, a rating or review on the App Store is the most helpful tip of all.