I’m now losing weight, thanks to Stelo and Cronometer.

But now I’m irritated at my various health apps because they want to show my average weight over a span of time—and not the rate at which I’m losing weight, which is a more important number to me right now.

That is, none of them seem to be willing to do any sort of meaningful curve fitting.

Worse: Cronometer and Stelo do not work together. That is, I have to manually enter the number of carbs I’ve consumed at each mean by hand into Stelo so I can check what I’m eating against my glucose levels, rather than have them automatically correlated. And while Cronometer can take in my glucose levels, it treats glucose as this alien artifact that it will graph for you if you insist—but will not correlate with what you ate.

And then there’s Withings, the app that connects to my scale and pours my weight into Apple Health—whose report if I’m gaining, losing or maintaining weight seems to have no correlation whatsoever with my actual weight. I can drop a pound in a week and it tells me my weight is stable; get on a plateau and it tells me I’m losing weight.

I mean, doesn’t any one teach basic statistics anymore?

And Apple Health is no better; it just told me I lost weight—good—but it won’t answer the question I have: how quickly am I losing weight? Are there trends in my weight loss? Am I losing weight at about the same pace, losing weight faster, or slower?

Seriously, it’s not hard to do a linear regression and cough up things like “in the past 14 days you averaged 1.1 pounds of weight loss per week.” Or “it appears there is a direct relationship between blood glucose spikes and milk.”

But then, all of this is par for the course for our industry. Everyone is just so happy to see something that they don’t stop to think if it is something useful.