About Whole Story
Whole Story is a health coach. You tell it what’s going on the way you’d tell a friend — how you slept, what’s been hurting, what you’re taking, what you’re trying to change — and it keeps all of it, in your words. Then it tells you what matters now.
More tracking was never the problem. A tracker shows you a chart; this tells you what it means for you, and what to do first.
It was built by one person, for himself first, because nothing he could buy would hold the whole of his health at once and tell him what to do about it on a Tuesday. His own account of that is the second half of this page.
The shape follows from that. The coach is the product, and the chat window is one of its mouths. A screen here is the coach showing you your chart. A note in the morning is the coach getting in touch. Correcting something it wrote down is correcting your coach, and it takes the correction.
It has no goals of its own. No streak, no score, nothing to keep up with. What you’re working on changes month to month, and a coach still pushing last month’s plan is broken however good its figures are.
Where it is
Whole Story is an iPhone app, in English, in the United States first. Apple Health is optional: connect it and your nights and your days arrive without you typing anything, or leave it and everything works from what you tell it. Seven days free, then a subscription.
Where it is going
Next is the same coach, further in. Noticing that holds up across a month rather than one loud night. A calendar that marks what kind of day each day is. A fresh goal that already has a suggested plan, a focus, and a promise, so you are not starting from a blank page. A chart handed over the way a coach would slide it across the table. A way in for someone who would rather not start with a conversation.
What it will not become: a clinic, a second medical record, a feed, or a place that sells your week. The job is one coach that keeps up, not a platform with a coach attached.
The longer version is the roadmap, and updates is everything that has actually changed so far. Two longer pieces, if you want them: what this is, and why, and the note Health is hard alone.
It’s a coach, not a doctor: it points you to the right care when something needs it.
Who builds it
I'm Brian. I build Whole Story, and I'm also the first person it was built for.
At 18 I was the kid in the first photo. A natural athlete who trained hard, taught himself to lift, and did stupid amounts of cardio for fun. That's the finish line of the Bolton Ironman in England. I thought I knew what I was doing with my health, and for a while I did.
Then I fell off. From about 20 to 25 I stopped training, stopped looking after myself, and ended up in a bad place: mental health, addiction, all of it. The second photo is me at around 25, at 320 pounds. Getting there took a few years of not paying attention. Getting back took a lot longer than that.
From about 23 to 26 the work was the mental health and the addiction, and getting my life back. Back to college, back to something like a routine. From 26 to 31 it was the health itself: losing the weight, getting fit again, and learning. I read everything, tested everything, tried everything, and collected a lot of doctors. And even with the weight gone and the fitness back, the energy, the motivation and the low moods didn't fully come back with it. That's what finally sent me into the research on hormones and blood work, pushing for a full panel, and finding things that had been missed for years and could be treated. Meds, supplements, diet, training, sleep, mental health: I've worked on it every day for more than a decade now, and the third photo is what that looks like. Healthy again. Happy.
Two things I took from that. Getting back on track is far harder and far slower than staying ahead of it in the first place. And even now, knowing what I know, I struggle to manage it all. Several doctors, a long list of prescriptions and supplements, blood panels through the year, training most days, a watch, and more apps than I can keep open. None of them knows about the others. The question I could never get answered was the simple one: what matters right now, and is any of it working?
I'm a self-taught engineer, finance before that, with an MBA from Notre Dame, so I built the thing I wanted. First for me. Then for the friends and family who kept asking me health questions, because nothing they owned held enough of their situation to answer, and I was just the closest thing they had. Now, hopefully, for anyone who wants a coach that makes this story easier than it was for me: one that knows your history, notices what has changed, and tells you what to look at first.
It still has a lot of room to grow. If it helps a few people get healthy and stay there, it was worth building, and worth the years it took to learn what's in it. Thanks for reading this far, and if you try it, thank you for that too.