Saturday, November 22, 2014

I Talked in Public About my Weight! Yikes!

There is this thing: Quantified Self. They even call it a "movement". Their tag is "self-knowledge through numbers".  Clearly this is my tribe. We get together every few months, and do show and tell where we answer three basic questions:

  • What did you do?
  • How did you do it?
  • What did you learn?
So in front a group of about fifty strangers, I got up and walked through some of my numbers.  It was videotaped, and there is a chance that will end up on the internets. But preparing for the talk took me back through some of my history, so I thought I'd share it here.

This was also almost the first time I gave a public talk without a word-for-word script. I wrote a word-for-word script, read it out loud, and it was way too long and way too... hmmm... I'll say "suitable for a Weight Watchers meeting" - too personal and not all about the numbers. I wrote another script, shorter and tied to just things that can be deduced from the things I'm showing. Then, I boiled it down to a few main bullets for each slide-what do I want the audience to focus on in each slide? I had the paper with the bullets in my hand while I talked, but I think I did fine without ever looking at it. I'd love to see the video to get feedback on my performance.

What follows are the slides I used, with my main points as a caption for each.


Hi, I’m Nan Shellabarger
·         Desk-bound policy wonk by day.
·         Used to be hands-on data analyst, still looking for patterns in data
·         Personal data for a long time
·         Since QS, going past the collection and visualization of the data,
trying to focus on what did I learn?



I’ve been collecting my weight data since 1988
·         In 1995, started this very spreadsheet in excel
·         Daily data, and calendar week averages
·         Manual at first, now Withings wifi means copy cut and paste
·         Two big losses, second one slower, gradual increases with intermittent corrections
·         The story of these years, much meaning to me



Adding context for you
·         Green arrows are fun things I challenged myself to do
·         Clouds are health issues, major but not life threatening
·         Red explosions are major life disruptions
·         These cataclysms mean attention elsewhere,
but a year or so later, a renewed focus on getting in shape



I’ve been collecting exercise data since 1995
·         Each year a separate chart, lined up manually here, through 2008
·         Arbitrary scale, collected manually, more color means I moved more
·         Clearly a lot of exercise when losing weight, but not tight
·         In 2010, got the BMF, Sony Betamax exercise equip
Superior technology, lost in marketplace, highly accurate calorie counter
·         Sadly, broke this July
·         Today, Garmin vivofit and Jawbone UP24, but no good for calories so haven’t done much with them yet.



Zooming in on the last five years
·         Two separate charts manually lined up
·         Gradual increases followed by sharp corrections apparent
·         Less than ten pound range – very stable
·         Calories burned: dark line is average daily calories for a calendar month
·         Average went down when I lost weight
·         Not much relationship to the gain / loss cycle



Made heat maps one snowy day last February
·         Took 4-5 hours to wrangle the data into this format
·         Sleep more on weekends
·         Exercise more on weekends, and Mondays too
·         Tracked food through MyFitnessPal
·         Clear relationship between periods of food tracking and weight going down
Whole lot of work




What have I learned?
·         Not a simple machine
·         Not just an engineering problem of calories in and out
·         Benefiting and suffering from homeostasis
·         Managing my food is a whole lot of work but essential
·         Fond of exercise, except for the first five minutes, need motivation
·         Its ok to put energy elsewhere when you need to


1 comment:

KCF said...

Someone will have to pick my jaw up from the floor. I'm speechless. This is incredible. Like really a life's work kind of incredible. And the best thing, I feel i"ve learned something from it. Or learned anew--homeostasis is a thing. Diets work. Not paying attention doesn't.There is no long-term balance, there is short-term equilibirium. I'm blown away!!