Habits

Habits are small daily things with a cue attached, because the cue is the active ingredient. You choose which ones are active; the tab shows today's ticks and a strip of the past week. There are no habit streaks.

The Habits tab: 3 of 5 done so far today, a seven-day strip, and habits grouped under Movement and Nutrition, each with a tick and a line saying where its credit comes from.

The twelve habits

Habit	Cue	Checks itself?
Log your meals as you go		From your diary: entries in two or more meals.
Step on the scale after waking		When a weigh-in is logged for the day.
Put protein in your first meal		From your diary: breakfast protein at or above 0.4 g per kg of body weight (25 g without a profile).
Fruit or vegetables at two meals		When foods from the Fruit or Vegetables pantry shelves appear in two meals.
Drink water with each meal	The meal is the cue	No
Set up tomorrow's lunch after dinner	While the kitchen is already out	No
Walk 7,000 steps		From Apple Health steps, once connected from the habit's own screen.
Walk ten minutes after your biggest meal	After your biggest meal	No
Get up at your usual time		From Apple Health sleep: waking within 45 minutes of your average over up to seven prior nights, once there are at least three.
Get daylight soon after waking	Within an hour of waking	No
Read or stretch before lights out	The last twenty minutes of the day	No
Eat dinner away from your phone	Out of reach before the first bite	No

You can add your own habit with a name and a cue. Custom habits are manual. The 7,000-step figure is where the 2025 Lancet Public Health dose-response review levels off; the per-meal protein figure follows Schoenfeld and Aragon (2018).

How self-checking works

A self-checking habit's row says where its credit comes from, so an automatic tick never reads as mysterious. The rules are plain:

A manual tick is never touched. If you ticked it, it stays, even when the rule no longer confirms it.
Only active habits earn credit. A habit you have not adopted earns nothing, or the week strip would fill with credit for habits nobody is working on.
A device that cannot see a signal leaves that habit alone, in both directions. If steps or sleep are not connected on this phone, those habits are neither credited nor cleared here.
Automatic credit can be withdrawn when the day's data no longer confirms it and you never ticked it yourself, as when a diary entry is deleted.
Unconfirmed is blank. A habit the rules cannot confirm renders as an ordinary untick, never as a failure.

What is deliberately absent

No streaks, no chains to keep unbroken, no notification when a day is missed. The week strip is a record of what happened. Today's count reads as done over active, such as 3 / 5, and that is all it says.

See also: Apple Health for the steps and sleep connections, Export for how ticks are recorded with their origin.