An Analytical Approach to Being Healthier
With the New Year upon us, it seemed like a good time to reflect on steps I have taken over the past few years to be more healthy. Though I never considered myself that overweight, I did spend a few years recently living in Chicago — not exactly a place known for its healthy local delicacies. Add in the lifestyle of an MBA student at a school known for its active social life and I found myself 10–15 pounds more than I should have been.
Phase I — Increase the Exercise
It was February 2009 when I decided to try and be healthier. I had a job in hand and about 4 months left in Evanston before I moved on to the next chapter, so it seemed like I could be successful. Because I tend to be an analytical person, I decided to track how often I exercised and weighed myself periodically to see if I could find any correlations:
The blue line connects my periodic weight measurements, while the red is the number of “exercise units” over the past 30 days. One mile running = 1 and other types of exercise that I did are weighted based on their intensity level (0.6 miles hiking = 1 mile running, for example).
When looking at the data, it seems increasing the volume of exercise didn’t have much effect. Even with huge increases in April and August (turning 30 and not working yet for those still reading), my weight stayed in the 180–185 range. I also moved to Seattle in the summer of 2009 and felt like I was starting to eat healthier and drink less, but this only had a marginal effect as I remained in the 180 range until late in 2010.
Phase II — New Focus on Diet
In September 2010 (the end of the graph above) I decided to also track the food I was eating in hopes of seeing better results. Around that time I read In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan and decided to incorporate more plants and less meat into my diet. I decided to track the % of vegetarian meals (lunch and dinner only) along with continuing to monitor how often I exercised and how much I weighed:
This approached worked far better — you can see the blue weight line drop as the green line is increasing (% vegetarian prior to my tracking are estimates as I rarely ate vegetarian). When I took the vegetarian % from around 50% to 60–70% this summer, the blue line dropped even further as I have dropped far more weight than I was expecting. This approach took me to below 160 for the first time since early in my high school years. If you look at exercise vs. weight loss (dropping veggie % due to the need for a 3rd axis), I was not increasing exercise during this time and often was exercising even less:
Conclusions
From my experience, eating a healthier diet with more vegetarian meals and less meat has been the secret to becoming healthier (along with maintaining moderate levels of exercise). I still enjoy a great burger, pork sandwich, or slice of pizza, but make sure to limit the number of times I do so.
Beyond being healthier, I really enjoyed the exercise of analyzing the data and seeing the correlations that resulted. The process of doing this, though, was far more difficult than it should have been. I had my data in 3 separate places with my food log in Office Web Apps, my exercise in RunKeeper and my weight in HealthVault. I then had to do some gymnastics in Excel to format the data so I could compare all 3 data series. With the number of people trying to lose weight through similar methods, you would think an app would exist to make this far easier. Since Google has dropped their health product and Microsoft’s HealthVault is not the most user-friendly, hopefully there is a startup somewhere working on a multi-faceted health app to take advantage of what could be a huge opportunity.
Originally published at www.ryanmetzger.org on January 16, 2012.
