The Quantified Self Movement - Your Life in Data - Men’s Fitness
It has never been easier to track every aspect of your health and habits – but can crunching the resulting numbers make you fitter, happier or more productive? MF’s Mark Bailey volunteered to find out
Like most active guys, I’m convinced that I live a healthy lifestyle. I exercise four or five times a week, I work a reasonable eight hours a day and I’m confident I sleep for eight hours a night. I cook fresh food most evenings and think I eat a well balanced diet, give or take the odd Nando’s. But just 48 hours into a four-week experiment in ‘self-tracking’, using sensors, blood samples, phone apps and websites to convert my assumptions into the cold, hard empirical data spread over these pages, I discover a problem: I’ve got it all wrong.
Here’s a fragment of reality from day two: I wake up at 6.58am after five hours and 48 minutes of sleep. A heart rate test confirms my fitness is ‘moderate’ – one rung below ‘average’. A droplet of blood shows my glucose levels are below normal at 3.8 millimoles per litre (mmol/L). I work for a stress-inducing 11 hours, complete a 7km treadmill run then go to bed with a calorie deficit of 536. As for that ‘run’, my heart rate rarely scraped above a ‘moderate intensity’ 145bpm. Admittedly, I was watching the cricket at the time.
‘Self-tracking’ is the growing trend of quantifying your daily activities to gain insights into your life. Thanks to intelligent gadgets, phone apps and algorithmic websites, it’s now easy to track everything from your REM sleep and protein intake to cycling cadence and GPS movements. You could even monitor the psychological profile of your tweets (tweetpsych.com) to gauge your relative positivity or chart your sex life (bedposted.com): what time did you start? How long did it last? How was it?
‘Right now self-tracking is mainly for the obsessives, nerds and fitness fanatics, but it will soon become the new normal,’ says Kevin Kelly, co-founder of self-tracking blog Quantified Self (QS). ‘You’ll do it because it’s easy, cheap and beneficial for your life. This is self-knowledge with numbers. It’s examined life. It’s very profound.’ QS has tripled its membership in the last year and now hosts 21 regular ‘meet-ups’ around the globe from San Francisco to Sydney.
The Daily Burn website, a health-logging social community, has over a million members, while four million people use the Nike+ run-tracking website. Life-tracking is big business. It also seems to work. Steven Dean, who runs the QS meet-ups in New York, improved his half marathon pace from ten minutes per mile to just over seven through self-tracking. ‘I tracked my heart rate, the distance, speed and time of every workout, energy levels, mood and sleep,’ he says. ‘I adjusted my workouts, nutrition and sleep based on trends I observed. If my morning heart rate was elevated, I knew I was probably overtraining and took a week off.’
Others go further. Graphic designer Nicholas Felton, for instance, has been publishing printed Annual Reports of his life since 2005. In 2008, he drank 408 beers, read 2,440 book pages and played 62 hours of Grand Theft Auto IV. Software developer Mark Carranza maintains a searchable archive of the one million ideas he’s had since 1984 (try uploading your own thoughts at webbrain.com).
Seth Roberts, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, has used data to self-experiment for 35 years. ‘I’ve found new ways to lose weight, sleep better and be in a better mood,’ he says. Drinking fructose water helped him to lose 16kg, delaying breakfast until 11am improved his sleep and watching faces on TV boosted his mood. Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Body, implanted a Dexcom Seven blood glucose monitor into his abdomen to analyse his diet.
Swiss millionaire Dan Stoicescu tracks the very data of life itself. In 2008, he paid $350,000 (around £180,000) for his complete genome sequence from Knome, a personal genomics company. As DNA markers of disease are discovered, he can check his susceptibility. ‘The technology has changed one million-fold in cost and accuracy over the past seven years,’ says George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard, who co-founded Knome. ‘The cost is below $5,000 [around £3,080] per person now – or about $20 [£12.30] a month for 20 years. Isn’t that worth the potential impact on your career and loved ones?’
While I won’t be playing God with my DNA, I am spending four weeks tracking my life to see what I can learn about myself. A Polar RS800CX heart rate monitor charts my workouts, a Ki Fit armband and Omron pedometer analyse my daily movements and iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy S apps monitor everything from calories and exercise (Daily Burn, MyFitnessPal) and water guzzled (Water Tracker) to money spent (Account Tracker). By day, I develop an antisocial habit of beeping like R2D2 in public and scurrying to the bathroom to squeeze blood into an Accu-Chek Aviva Nano glucose monitor to gauge the metabolic effects of a chicken sandwich. At night, I monitor my dozing with a Sleeptracker watch and Zeo Personal Sleep Coach ‘headband’ (not a good look, unless your girlfriend has Chilean miner fantasies).
The truth hurts. I have vague ambitions to build muscle, but my weight training has no focus and on seven of the first 14 days I’ve not eaten enough calories to fuel my exercise, let alone add muscle. The lack of gains I’ve lazily ascribed to ‘lean genes’ is more about basic maths. On day 12, I’m 612 calories short of my weightgaining 3,300 calorie target. I run for cardiovascular fitness, but my heart rate stays so snugly in its comfort zone it’s practically wearing slippers. My diet is reasonably healthy but miserably repetitive. Chicken, pasta, peppers, tomatoes, spinach and onions appear in eight of the first 14 dinners and chicken dominates another ten lunches. I estimate that I’m personally responsible for the deaths of 250 chickens a year and imagine their ghosts forlornly pecking the carpet all around me. I’m severely lacking in bone-building vitamin K and eye-protecting vitamin A and the blood tests prove the glucose damage of white toast with jam. Although I guzzle buckets of water all day (perhaps too much) I inexplicably stop at 8pm which, after gym sessions, is when I need it the most. Yes, I’m often in bed for eight hours, but I read, work and watch TV so I’m sleeping less than six hours a night. I’m also working over 50 hours a week across all seven days.
My financial vices turn out to be newspapers and magazines. They’re a small daily expense, but over a year I blow more than £1,200 on printed paper. Hard facts I’m shocked. My calorie deficit, sleep issues and magazine bills are genuinely surprising. My repetitive diet I ascribe to the perils of routine: I evidently decided ‘chicken + pasta = healthy’ and started cooking on autopilot. My gym performance is down to a lack of focus. But only by tracking this data have I discovered the blind spots and convenient self-deceptions. ‘When you measure something it’s easier to succeed,’ says the self-experimenting Roberts. ‘By studying my data I can learn what controls I’m measuring. Setting a goal doesn’t do that.’ Last year I set a goal of adding 2kg of muscle in 2 months. I failed. But by tracking the data, not the goal, I know why: insufficient nutrition and unchallenging workouts. Some issues are simple to solve. Daily Burn tells me to eat broccoli for vitamin K and sweet potatoes for vitamin A; the Water Tracker app nudges me to hydrate in the evening; my heart rate monitor helps me to bash out intensive interval training; and my improved calorie intake and workout structure sees a bench press progression from 24kg to 28kg dumb-bells. Punching data into my phone irritates me, but I’m more nutritionally aware – I know that cottage cheese has 17g less fat than feta cheese. ‘Doing things manually forces you to pay attention to the numbers,’ says Kelly. It’s not all good. My leg exercises make slower progress (you still need to put the effort in), I have to quash a rise in fat intake as I devour more calories and, although TV-rationing improves my sleep, I still can’t get near to seven hours. I don’t stop working at weekends either. Introspection, however, can quickly lead to selfabsorption and by week four I feel as if I’ve been plugged into the Matrix: the world has become a stream of numbers. When I go to the pub (550 steps from my house) all I can see is 244-calorie pints and 809-calorie pizza temptations. At my niece’s christening I stare blankly at the buffet because I don’t know what cheese is in the sandwiches. If I can’t log it, I can’t eat it. When a friend casually asks, ‘How’s things?’ I spew out a torrent of stats about average wake-up times. I don’t think that’s what she meant. Tracking your life can, it turns out, stop you living it. Reality check In truth, I’m getting confused. It’s easy to tally calories burned versus calories consumed, follow the graph on my heart rate watch or deduce that I stop drinking water at 8pm because I’m glued to the sofa, but why do I sometimes wake up three times a night with calf cramps? Why do I make more Google searches on Tuesdays? Is a maximum running cadence of 99rpm OK? And what if this software telling me to scoff more food is completely wrong? I have all the data, but not all the answers. ‘Most people don’t have the tools or skills to review their data,’ says Dean. ‘I know athletes who share their data with coaches who can interpret them.’ Ian Li, of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, agrees but adds that new data interpretation tools are necessary. ‘Knowledge and expert analysis will remain an important part of self-tracking,’ he says. ‘Developers will start to focus on analytics: how can tools make better sense of data?’ This, in part, is why Felton arranges his travel habits and GTA stats into such arresting graphs and diagrams. ‘Our brains are visual organs and visualising information is critical to finding trends and outliers,’ he says. Self reflection Studying your data with experts and harnessing new interpretation tools might fill the current knowledge gap, but self-trackers can also learn a lot from each other. The website CureTogether displays the results of DIY experiments by users who share conditions such as depression or back pain. ‘CureTogether amplifies the power of individual data by comparing it against thousands of other people going through the same thing,’ says cofounder Alexandra Carmichael, who banished her migraines with a gluten-free diet recommended by other sufferers. My night-time calf cramps is a problem shared by 282 members, 49 per cent of whom believe dehydration is the cause. Given my H20-dodging habits after 8pm, this could be the answer I’m looking for. ‘Eventually we will get personalised recommendations from an artificially intelligent doctor that we build, like the Deep Blue computer for chess,’ says Carmichael. ‘Self-tracking will become a background part of everyday life and sites such as CureTogether will watch your data streams and nudge you not to eat that cake if you’ve had enough sugar or provide a wake-up alarm if your sleeping brainwaves signal an imminent migraine.’ It’s an intriguing vision of the future. For now, we can still learn plenty from apps, websites and beeping gadgets. At its simplest level, self-tracking has provided me with a moment of self-reflection. I’ve made crucial discoveries that will benefit my health and fitness: I’ll continue to train with a heart rate monitor, work on my sleep problems and spare the lives of a few chickens. But I think I’ll limit hardcore self-tracking to a ‘check in’ every few months to see where I’ve strayed or identify new issues. In between, I’d prefer to look at a pint of beer as a frothy vessel of social entertainer, not a sinister glass full of numbers.
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