Mr. Health Tracker’s Manifesto

Hi. I’m Mr. Health Tracker and I crunch numbers for a living.

I’m good at my day job, but it doesn’t give me a great deal of fulfillment. I can’t remember the last time I was bursting with joy or even just mildly happy at work. I crunch numbers for a large corporation, mainly with the goal of making or saving them a ton of money. When I do this, someone five levels above me gets a nice bonus, but my life doesn’t change much.

But there’s a silver lining. The good thing about my job (other than paying my bills and funding vacations) is that it helped me develop useful analytical skills that translate to other areas of my life which are meaningful to me, like improving my overall health and well-being. And now, I get to pass these skills on to you, which is also very fulfilling. How has number crunching helped me improve my health?

Well, here’s an example:

2009: Losing 30 pounds

In college, like many others, I gained “the freshman fifteen.” By the time I graduated, I had gained another fifteen on top of that. After I graduated from college, I began my cubicle career, and the sedentary job didn’t help my weight situation. By the time I was 25, I was the heaviest I’d ever been.

Sadly, this was the story of my life in my 20's

It was around this time that I decided to get my act together. I educated myself on health and fitness and, combining this with my love for numbers, I began tracking my nutrition. At the time, my method was pretty rudimentary. I wasn’t even counting calories. I assigned a score for each of my meals based on how much I thought I ate. But it worked. Within a few months, I had lost 30 pounds of fat.

Here’s another example:

2016: Turning my health around

Through calorie counting, I maintained my weight despite occasionally eating pretty poorly. In fact, I prided myself in being able to stay lean while binging on all-you-can-eat buffets, never ending pasta, and double entree meals.

Then, something caught up with me. I was on the tail end of a couple months of nonstop vacations and the quality of my diet was at an all-time low. The majority of my diet consisted of fast food or unhealthy restaurant meals. I was in Washington DC on the seventh vacation in about 10 weeks when I felt this weird pain in my heart after eating (my second fast food dinner). It wasn’t bad enough for me to want to go to the ER, but it definitely wasn’t normal and it freaked me out.

I immediately decided to eat as clean as possible starting that moment during that trip. I eliminated all grains, dairy, sugar, and alcohol from my diet and basically ate a very strict version of Paleo for about two months. The pain was never that bad again. A much duller version of it came and went for a few weeks, usually after eating, but it eventually subsided and then went away.

During those couple of months, I had a laser-like focus on my diet. Since then, I’ve loosened up a bit, but after that experience, I decided I would do everything in my power to improve my health by measuring not just the quantity but the quality of my diet. So I began tracking the number of servings of fruits and vegetables I eat each day.

I went from eating less than a few servings of fruits and veggies per week to a few servings per day. As a result, I feel much better overall and haven’t even really gotten sick during the last year even when people around me were. I have been much more conscious about what I eat. I stopped eating obscene quantities of food in one sitting and started making better choices at restaurants. I eat a green smoothie almost every day for lunch. All because I began tracking.

Now, I hold myself accountable.

Now, I track my calories, macros, fruits and veggies, steps, workouts, and sleep.

After I started tracking my steps, I increased my daily step count from under 5,000 per day to over 8,000. I’ve improved my numbers on key lifts in the gym and gotten fitter and stronger than I was in my 20s.

I’ve number crunched my way to better health, but I’ve still got plenty of room for improvement. Now it’s your turn. I started Mr. Health Tracker to share my daily methods and results with you so that you can start tracking your own stats to improve your health and self-awareness. The more you track, the more you will learn about yourself.

How do you know if Mr. Health Tracker is for you?

If you are interested in improving your health, love crunching numbers, collecting data on yourself, and self-experimenting, you’re going to feel like a kid in a candy store.

If you don’t care about your health or think numbers, data, and spreadsheets are lame, then this probably isn’t the place for you. Maybe you’d prefer a real candy store.

If that’s the case, no worries. I’m not here to serve everyone. But if you’re as nerdy and analytical as I am, like funny movie references and all-around political incorrectness, and aren’t willing to leave your health to chance, I think we’ll get along great. Hell, I can probably learn as much from you as you can from me. So let’s track some stats together and see if we can create better lives for everyone in the process.

If you are ready to start your own health tracking journey, sign up for my weekly newsletter below and I’ll send you my best tips, tools, and resources to help you number crunch your way to better health and a better life.

Thanks for reading! To show my appreciation, here are a couple of health tracking goodies for ya:

1. The Google spreadsheet I use to track my own health stats. Just save a copy or download as an Excel file (no subscription required, please enjoy!)
2. My weekly newsletter where I share my personal stats and most practical, actionable tips to help you on your own health journey. Sign up below:

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