I tracked everything in 2019. Here are the results.

To start with, I love data and everything about it.
I have been tracking my health since 2016. This is the first year I’m actually sharing it with the world. What follows is a personal story with data to back up a whirlwind of a year.

I bought the Fitbit Charge 3 and the Fitbit Aria 2 scale in late 2018 and set up IFTTT to dump all the stats into a google sheet. Which I used to crunch the numbers. I tracked more metrics but these are the ones I chose to publish:

So let’s get started with the charts!

Weight
This will serve as an anchor post for us to make sense of the rest of the data.
And yes, I know I put on weight this year, my wife doesn’t let me forget.

On an average for my age and height, it puts me in a higher percentile of weight but not obese just yet.

Insight:
I put on 8 lbs this year. Largest jump in weight came in March when there was a rather stressful time in my life which led to a lot of stress eating.

Calories burned
My alleged BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is around ~1750 calories / day according to https://www.bmrcalculator.org, that is in blue. Any other calories burned are extra.

Insight:
I burn 1750 calories doing nothing. On an average I burned 250–400 more than that. Which means I can eat roughly that much to keep status quo.
But as my weight graph shows, obviously did not turn out that way.

Steps taken
After recovering from the stress in March 2019 I slowly started to increase the activity I did in general.
However November was my most productive month yet. I helped ship major features at work and in open source.

Insight:
High productivity for my profession means a lot of brain activity and no physical activity and it shows in my two most productive months (March and November). The spread of steps across the week in general is good enough for me.

Time slept
I came across Dr. Matthew Walker’s interview on the JRE Podcast where he goes in deep on how sleep is the super power we keep ignoring. After that I started to take my sleep more seriously.
You see the uptick in overall sleep increase from an average of ~5.5 hrs to ~6 hrs minimum after reading his book and the podcast. The time awake is a Fitbit metric to track the time

Insight:
Being the productivity junkie that I am, Monday’s are huge for me. I am pumped and start preparing for them from Sunday
But that also means that I don’t get enough sleep based on weekly deliverables and meeting timings.
However, things start to stabilize as the week progresses.

I usually leave the bed as soon as I am awake. Apparently not on Fridays which was surprising.

Concern is that I get more restless through the week.

Time sedentary:
On an average, I sleep ~ 6 hours and commute ~2 hours a day, hence the baseline is 8 hours of being sedentary.
Largest shocker was November where I had a lot of work and also the start of the holiday season seems to have had me doing as little as possible.

Mondays seem to be the most time I spend sitting around. Probably because I plan and get the most amount of work done.

Insight:
Need to equalize the spread of sedentary time across the week and keep it under an hour or so (over the required 8 hours)
Major equalizing is required on the yearly chart.

General activity
Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are when I hit the gym. (Got a membership in the later half of the year)

Insight:
Some days are good days, some are bad. Activity dwindles into the weekend.
Need to include a daily activity to keep activity high through out the week.

Thoughts on the data:

• Weight and Calorie burn rate shows a fair amount of activity, but still the gradual weight gain points to unhealthy eating.
• Being more aware of sleep has led to better sleep, but it can improve.
  Unsure as to why restlessness increases as the week progresses.
• Need to push the daily ‘very active’ time ≥ 20m on average everyday.
  Which would mean need *at least* 40m of time very active.
• Sleep more than an average of 7 hours daily.

Changes to be made for the next year:

In general it is advised that if we want to start a new habit, we must integrate it in our daily routine such that there is minimal friction. Given the things I want to change, these options seem viable for now.
Do you recommend anything else? Please comment as I’d love to read them!

• Take stairs instead of the elevator
• Take short walks post lunch to reduce sedentary time and aid digestion.
• Utilize the time spent on the train (commute) wisely.
  I usually listen to podcasts, but I need to meditate at least one way.

What I would like to do in more detail next year in terms of tracking:

• Break down the sleep stats by sleep phases
• Track water intake
• Track heart rate (Fitbit tracks this but I wasn’t able to export the HR data, it became too much to process anyway)
• Find a monthly review period where I compile all of this at the end of the month.

Random insights:

• For my height and stride, I walked over 1050 miles (~1690 km) this year.
  Basically, I walked from Pune to Jaipur (India) or from San Francisco to Pheonix (US).
• I scaled the height of Mt Everest (29,029 ft) and 5,951 ft on top of that.

Steps you can take to log your data more effectively

• I used IFTTT recipes to auto dump Fitbit data everyday into a google sheet.
  This helped because once setup, I didn’t check it until the end of the year.
  Out of sight, out of mind. I just kept using my Fitbit tracker and scale.
• IFTTT recipe links: Daily activity tracking, Sleep logs and Weight logs.
• By the end of a complete day, you will start to see the sheets get auto populated.

Conclusion

A general practice to introduce new habits that stick is to make them small, easy and frictionless. Then it becomes easier to integrate them in a routine.
The charts have given me insights into what I need to change and have encouraged me to do more, hopefully they will inspire you too.