Nutrition Tracking and the Importance of Individualized Prescriptions with Ommyx Founder Kassandra Hobart

So I had been diligently tracking my macros for a while now, but wasn’t even sure why anymore. 

Some days I would hit my targets, but many days I wouldn’t, and generally I would just shrug it off, tell myself I’d do better the next day—you know, the whole kind, compassionate and non-judgmental tactic—and then head to bed. Rest and repeat. 

The point is, like many CrossFit athletes, I love tracking. Tracking nutrition, tracking performance, tracking sleep. I love data.

But what’s the point in tracking if it’s not helping you make effective and efficient changes that help you move forward as an athlete?

That’s the thought I started having and it’s also one of the thoughts long-time CrossFit athlete, and nutrition therapy practitioner Kassandra Hobart, had when she co-founded Ommyx—“the second brain for your health.”

Remind me: Ommyx is a highly-personalized nutrition tracking and performance app that integrates with your unique data to provide practical, individualized recommendations you can implement to improve your nutrition, sleep and performance. 

The details: Like most nutrition tracking apps, Ommyx users input what they eat each day into the app, but unlike many other apps, Ommyx allows the user to be as broad and general, or as granular, as they wish. 

For example, you can let the app know you ate some scrambled eggs on a bagel with some watermelon for breakfast. Or you can let the app know you ate a sesame bagel of a particular brand with a teaspoon of butter, three large eggs, 150 grams of watermelon and 16 ounces of coffee with one tablespoon of heavy cream. 

• “Our mission behind that is to meet people where they are and be able to customize the experience for them,” Hobart said.

Five other features I found that set Ommyx apart from my old nutrition tracking app:

• Ommyx allows me to customize my logging preferences, so I can choose between options like my macronutrient breakdowns, daily targets, or meal-specific targets.
• Ommyx lets me not only search from their extensive food database, but also scan barcodes and import recipes from a URL, or even build my own recipe.
• Ommyx features a hydration tracking feature that lives in the same place as my nutrition tracking and has been very useful in helping me drink enough water each day. 
• Ommyx started to learn my meal habits as I went, and provides me meal targets that reflect my habits. 
• Ommyx even let me import my nutrition history from my other app so I didn’t lose any data, meaning I started getting relevant recommendations right away.

The big picture is that Ommyx seeks to essentially learn as much as possible about you as an individual—from your age, height and weight, to your resting heart rate and heart rate variability, to your activity level and sleep habits, to your performance goals—before offering individualized “cross functional recommendations” to help you reach whatever specific goals you have, Hobart explained. 

• “The goal of the recommendations is to help improve your performance, or your sleep, or your nutrition or whatever goal you choose, and in such a way that’s specific to you,” she said. 
• Ommyx’s Sara Hendershot added: “​​Ommyx is the first app of its kind to house all of your health and performance data in a single place and provide personalized, actionable insights. Rather than navigating several different apps and making assumptions about how your different metrics may be related, Ommyx offers you one big-picture snapshot and shows you the individual and collective impacts on your health and performance.”

How it does this: Ommyx integrates with basically every other performance, nutrition and sleep app (or wearable) under the sun, including Google calendar, Outlook calendar, WHOOP, Oura Ring, Strava, FitBit, Peloton, Garmin, Coros, Concept2, Eight Sleep, Polar, Suunto, Withings, Swift and Apple Health.

• For example, let’s say you currently use WHOOP. When you begin using Ommyx, with just one click you can give Ommyx access to your WHOOP data. So when Ommyx is making nutrition recommendations it can factor in your sleep, recovery and heart rate variability data from WHOOP to deliver the best practical recommendations for you. 

In practice: What I have found the most valuable about Ommyx’s recommendations is that they are bite-sized, practical recommendations I can implement now. Best of all, they come just once a week, so it’s not as though I’m bombarded by a new priority each day.

• For example, considering my goal of physical recovery, and my nutrition data and sleep schedule, one easy recommendation it gave me one week was to add 60 grams of carbohydrates before I head to bed. 
• Further, all of my recommendations are pulled into my daily calendar, so that workout and meal times fit around my meetings and other busy responsibilities.

One big key: To make these recommendations even more specific, Ommyx also considers your specific goal—be it athletic readiness, improved fitness, cognitive performance or physical recovery—as well as any particular focuses (nutrition or otherwise) you have each week that you also enter into Ommyx.

The bottom line: If you’re a CrossFit athlete, you’re probably already tracking your nutrition. And maybe you’re even getting recommendations from your app or wearable. But chances are these recommendations are broad and might not be as effective as they could be. And because your data all lives in different apps and wearables, your recommendations from each app might be missing the big picture.

This is what truly sets Ommyx apart: Their machine intelligence is able to determine the most effective, individualized recommendations for you, something that would be impossible to do manually as a nutrition coach, as you likely don’t have the time or even ability to sort through thousands of data points about a person’s health and performance history like Ommyx can.

In this sense, Ommyx is truly a holistic approach to making sustainable nutrition and lifestyle changes that are truly personalized to you, something Hobart believes is the key to long-term success.

“We’re really focusing on what’s going  to work for you specifically. Your bio-individuality is just so important to help you get to your goals faster in a more efficient capacity,” she added. 

If you’re ready to try the app for yourself, get this Morning Chalk Up exclusive offer: use code “CHALKUP50” to redeem a FREE trial and 50% off your first month!