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