Modes

People use a tracker for genuinely different reasons, and the same dashboard can't serve all of them. Steady asks which one you are before it asks anything else.

The question at setup

The first screen of setup asks what you’re here for. Your answer decides your dashboard, how your targets are worked out, and which questions the rest of setup bothers you with.

You can switch modes later in Settings → Mode without losing anything you’ve logged.

Weight loss mode

Unchanged, and still the default: an adaptive calorie budget, a smoothed weight trend, a streak, and a goal date. See Your calorie budget.

Athlete mode

Built for training for something rather than shrinking.

Today’s session leads. Imported from TrainingPeaks or entered by hand, with carbs-per-hour, fluid, sodium, and estimated burn on the card itself. Tap through for the full before/during/after breakdown.

Calories start at maintenance and add the training on top. An athlete eating one fixed number on a rest day and a five-hour day is under-fuelling one of them. Steady is careful not to double-count here: the maintenance figure has training stripped out of it, so each day’s sessions can be added back individually.

Carbs are periodized to the day’s load. Not a fixed macro split — the ISSN and ACSM bands run from about 3.5 g/kg on a rest day to 9 g/kg on a very big one, and the day’s classification comes from its TSS when your plan publishes one, or its duration and intensity when it doesn’t.

Protein holds steady at 1.6–2.0 g/kg, higher on hard days and higher again if you’re running a deliberate deficit. Fat has a floor — going too low costs hormones and fat-soluble vitamin absorption, so calories give way before fat does.

Hydration comes from your own sweat rate once you’ve run a test, scaled to the local heat index. See Workouts & fueling.

Eating at maintenance

Athlete mode defaults to eat at maintenance, because under-fuelling is the most common way athletes lose a season.

If you want a body-composition block, turn it off and set a pace — but Steady caps the deficit at 1 lb/week whatever you ask for, and raises your protein target to 2.0 g/kg. Steeper than that and performance and lean mass go before fat does.

The weight card also watches for this: a sustained drop during a hard training block gets called out, because it usually means under-fuelling before it means progress.

General health mode

For people who aren’t chasing a number in either direction — not cutting, not training for anything, just eating well and keeping an eye on things.

No deficit. Your calorie target sits at maintenance, worked out the same adaptive way as everywhere else, with training-day fuel added on top if you log a session. There is no goal weight, and setup never asks for one.

The day is the dashboard. Calories, protein, and water up top; then fiber, sodium, and added sugar against sensible daily marks, with your latest blood panel underneath.

Movement without a training plan. Minutes today, minutes across the last seven days, and how many of those days you moved at all — shown against the usual 150-minutes-a-week guideline as context, not as a target you can fail.

Weight is still there, as a smoothed trend near the bottom of the dashboard rather than the score at the top.

Cycle tracking and fasting sit on this dashboard too, if you’ve switched them on.

The general-health add-on

The same health metrics are available as a switch in the other two modes. Turn on Track general health and whichever dashboard you picked also surfaces fiber, sodium, and added sugar, with blood-work tracking alongside.

It’s on permanently in general-health mode — there, it’s the point rather than an extra. Switchable any time in Settings → Mode.

Cycle tracking

Optional, off unless you ask for it, and offered at setup only when your profile makes it relevant — asked as a genuine question when your profile says prefer not to say, rather than assumed either way.

Log the first day of a period and Steady works out where you are: menstrual, follicular, ovulatory, or luteal. It learns your cycle length from your own history (recent cycles weighted more heavily, implausible gaps ignored as missed logs) and falls back to a 28-day default until it has two or three to learn from.

What you get from it:

• Context for the scale. A jump in the luteal week is usually water, and the app says so instead of leaving you to wonder.
• A small hydration nudge. Core temperature runs a touch higher in the luteal phase, so you sweat sooner. It’s the one phase effect concrete enough to earn a change to a number rather than just a note.
• Phase notes that are honest about the evidence. The research on cycle phase and performance is genuinely mixed and individual variation dwarfs the average effect, so these read as context for your own data, not a prescription.

Privacy

Cycle data is held to a stricter standard than anything else in the app:

• Locked behind Face ID, with your backup PIN as the fallback, alongside your progress photos. It re-locks every time the app leaves the foreground, and the dashboard card shows nothing but the word “Locked” until you unlock it — no phase, no day count, nothing.
• Stored only on this device. Never transmitted anywhere, by any feature.
• Never written to Apple Health, even with Health sync switched on.
• Never included in anything sent to an AI for a nutrition estimate.
• Switchable off, and erasable for good, in Settings.

Next: Getting started →

Steady is a personal project by Hunter Baisden · hunter.baisden@gmail.com
Everything you log stays on your iPhone. Read the privacy policy.