High-carb vs low-carb: how food moves your recovery
See whether your higher-carb days or your lower-carb days leave you better recovered and better rested the next morning, using your own logged food.
Data you need:
- Nutrition: apple-health or health-connect
- Recovery or sleep: oura or garmin or whoop or polar or withings or ultrahuman
Get your food into freddy
freddy reads the daily nutrition totals your food-logging app writes to Apple Health or Health Connect. Log a couple of weeks of meals in whichever app you like (for example Cronometer or MyFitnessPal) with it syncing to Apple Health or Health Connect, then confirm the numbers are flowing.
Run list_metrics and confirm I have daily nutrition data: carbohydrates, protein, fat and calories. Show me how many days I have logged and the date range.
freddy stores nutrition as daily totals, not per meal, so log through an app that syncs to Apple Health or Health Connect.
Split high-carb from low-carb days
Let the assistant sort your logged days by how much carbohydrate you ate.
Using my logged days, split them into my higher-carb third and my lower-carb third by grams of carbohydrate. For each group, show my average next-morning recovery: HRV, resting heart rate and sleep score. Do higher-carb days leave me better or worse recovered the next morning?
Control for the obvious
Carbs travel with other things. Ask the assistant to check whether it is really the carbs.
Before I trust that, check whether my high-carb days were also my hard-training days or my late-eating days, since those would muddy the result. If you can, compare high vs low carb only within similar training days.
What you'll see
You might find your higher-carb evenings line up with slightly better sleep and steadier HRV, or the opposite. Either way you get your own answer instead of a generic rule. The direction is personal.
The example is illustrative, not from your real logs.
Good to know
Nutrition is daily totals only. freddy sees the day's carbs, protein, fat and calories, not individual meals or their timing. For meal-level questions you need a continuous glucose monitor or a food-timing log.
You have to log food. This only works if you record meals in an app that syncs to Apple Health or Health Connect, and a few scattered days will not be enough. Aim for two weeks or more.
Correlation, not causation. Carbs ride along with training load, eating time and alcohol, so the control step is what keeps you from blaming the wrong thing.