Quantified ME
Wednesday, March 19, 2014 at 2:29 PM by Nick DeMartino I’ve been fat, I’ve been skinny, a roller-coaster of weight gain and loss, more of the former in recent years as I struggled with the impact of colon surgery, a late-stage scoliosis diagnosis. I didn’t seem to be able to control my food intake, and I became convinced that cardio sufficient to lose weight was now impossible for me.
Woe is me, I was thinking, self-pityingly, just as I stumbled across a post by my friend Shelley Palmer, whose blog tracks electronic devices and trends. Indeed, his post did focus on fitness gizmos from Fitbit and Jawbone, which I certainly had heard about given my recent interest in ‘wearable tech.”
I don’t know exactly what grabbed me in Shelly’s post -- dozens of similar stories have appeared across the web as the wearable health industry has taken off. I suspect it was how a person I knew described how he used a calorie counting app and a fitness tracker to lose 58.3 pounds in 189 days, or .3 pounds per day. He elaborates:
It’s not magic; it’s math. 3,500 calories = 1 lb. Every 3,500 calories you eat that you don’t burn, you gain a pound. Every 3,500 calories you burn that you don’t eat, you lose a pound. While this is not strictly true, for reasons that don’t matter here, it is a great baseline to use for changing your lifestyle based upon information you get from monitoring, or quantifying, your calories in and calories out.
Inspired, I ran out to Best Buy that afternoon and left with a Fitbit Flex and a Withings Wifi Scale. I created accounts for both products, as well as MyFitnessPal, an iOS app, and figured out how to link them together.
I’m happy to report that in 51 days I’ve lost 20 pounds, or .4 pounds per day, and along the way I’ve regained control of my food and dramatically increased my exercise, so far without any painful consequences.
This happened, pretty much as Shelly described the quantified self – being able to quantify my calories in and calories burned, and especially knowing in real time when the balance is about to go South. I know if I need to step up my exercise. I know if I need to restrict my food. No, I don’t always obey. But now I have no excuse.
To make this work, I have been diligent about recording calories in the MyFitnessPal app – it syncs between my iPad, iPhone and desktop, so there’s no excuse. The app’s database is immense and fairly accurate, so long as my estimates on portion size are honest.
I’ve also been rigorous about my exercise. I spend at least 40 minutes in the pool, vigorous water aerobics or swimming most weekday mornings. To that, I’ve added a heart-pounding walk each day, seamlessly tracked by my Fitbit, which calculates calories burned, and sends that data to MyFitnessPal. By last weekend I had nearly reached 15,000 steps per day, more than 5 miles. A few months ago, I had trouble with one mile. (Physical therapy with a miracle worker helped me “awaken” specific muscles that had not been firing properly, and that seems to have made all the difference.)
Two days ago I bought a bike, my new bike in more than 20 years, and I’m adding that to the mix.
Final word – music makes all the difference in my energy and motivation to increase my distance. Back when I was a runner, I laboriously programmed audio tape mixes with songs that drove me up hills and poured it on when I needed it. In today’s world, I make custom playlists in Spotify in a fraction of the time using the BPM Database and the All8 BPM tool. Here’s one just made for quick walking called, aptly, 120BPM
I think I’ll go try it, now.
Reader Comments (1)
Awesome. very informative article. Thank you for sharing this.