Stop tracking everything.
more than 31 pounds lost, over a thousand sessions tracked in different apps, 685 checkins on foursquare (about 300 in offices).
What you see on top is no secret it’s my life in digits, the only thing you can not see is how hard a friend and me worked out in two years.
I wore wearables for two years, tracked every single step until I discovered an article in a local online magazine which said that our government could use collected fitness data to rate our fitnesslevel for a better classification for social insurance when you’re self employed.
On the one hand I think this could be a good idea to wake up our society and motivate them to respect their own body and a bit more in a time where you get something to eat on very corner and even online. But this feels kind of weir at the same time.
My story and my body
In the beginning of 2012 nearly 200 lbs on the scale I knew I should get my ass up and do something against it. I felt terrible standing in front of a mirror I felt terrible for my own body. The best thing that could happen was that I used an app for casual runs, sent the CEO a message on facebook and told him that I would like to work for them. We met a few days later and I was in.
At this time we tried to figure out the best way to show the most important values of a running session right on your screen. Now the company has more than 60 million downloads and even more data. I know, that they never will provide an API because they already said that in 2012 and still handle it that way.
Quantified self
The Quantified Self is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical). Such self-monitoring and self-sensing, which combines wearable sensors (EEG, ECG, video, etc.) and wearable computing, is also known as lifelogging. Other names for using self-tracking data to improve daily functioning are “self-tracking”, “auto-analytics”, “body hacking” and “self-quantifying” — Wikipedia
Trackers, apps, motivation articles spring up like mushrooms in the last few months. It looks like we hate being monitored at the same time but it’s okay until we feed companies with our data as long as we can control it. And like I said above this way helped me to lose 31 pounds in not quite a year.
If you can imagine it, you can achieve it.
Some random guy told me this once and I always had this on mind for the last few months. It took me a while to realize that you can turn it into a new way for achieving things without tracking every single step, checkin in a restaurant or anything else you could track.
From that moment on, I jumped into my running shoes with just my phone and some music and you know what? It felt awesome, feeling the freedom and knowing that nobody knows where I am right now or what my pace is at the moment. It was just the casual 20 minutes run and my heart beating like hell because I was running really fast. 200 bpm, 120 … I don’t really know but I didn’t care at the moment.
Soon I will attend a track event and the only thing I will take with me is some music, a smile on my face and my father next to me.
