Here's a quick tip for all of you Apple Watch owners who keep track of your circles, just in case you make the same mistake that I did. I noticed a few days ago that the red circle (the Move ring) on my Apple Watch was increasing far slower than normal. Even after 30 minutes on a treadmill, it was logging less than half of the calories that I normally see, and my overall red circle activity at the end of the day was substantially lower than normal. It took a long time for me to find the solution, but ultimately I discovered that I needed to check my weight in the Health app on my iPhone, which was far lower than it should have been. Once I adjusted my weight up to the correct number, my Move ring started to count calories at the same rate that it usually does.
How did this happen in the first place? The Health app on the iPhone has a place to store your weight. if your weight doesn't change often, just manually enter the number once and then forget about it. However, if you are manually tracking your weight as it changes over time, it can be a pain to manually enter it in the Health app every day. For a long time now, my faster solution has been to use the Workflow app — which will soon be renamed the Shortcuts app in iOS 12. I have a very short workflow that simply asks me to enter my weight and then puts that data into the Health app:
Because it is one of the first four workflows in my Workflow app, I can just 3D Touch on the Workflow app icon on my iPhone's home screen, select Log My Weight, type the number, and then I'm done. The whole process takes maybe three seconds. In iOS 12, I'll be able to assign a voice command to start this workflow, making it even faster to trigger.
Last week, however, I suppose I should have spent more than three seconds to avoid being careless. It turns out that I had somehow tapped the wrong buttons and entered the wrong weight, and apparently my iPhone had no trouble accepting that I suddenly weighed half as much. (Um, thanks?) My Apple Watch also noticed, and as a result it decided that I must be burning far less calories for the same amount of activity.
Fortunately, this is an easy problem to fix. When you are looking at any health data source in the Health app, you can always tap Show All Data to see a list of every single entry. If you see an entry that is wrong, you can delete that entry. So to fix my problem, I just removed the incorrect weight, and the problem was solved.
