6-January-2020 By Jeffrey Cooper

Quantified Self: How I Finally Made Fitness Work For Me

For most of my life Fitness has evaded me. I was skinny in high school and even on Swim Team for a year, but I was not athletic. I didn’t like Phys Ed, it was not engaging for me. After College, slowly the weight came on. I made efforts off and on to control it, and was even successful in getting down to a very healthy weight by swimming and lifting weights at my work gym. That lasted for some time until, once again, it slowly started to come back.

Then I changed companies to Nokia, lots of business travel meant the pounds added on, and didn’t come off between trips. By the early 2000’s I was about 70 pounds overweight, give or take. By that time I had a girlfriend who was egging me to lose the weight. She asked me to go to group fitness with her, which is not really my thing, though it works for many people. Instead I promised to ride my bike and get into shape, which I did. A few weeks into that I had a very bad bike accident going around a corner (no cars involved, thankfully) and dislocated my elbow. OUCH.

Now what? By this time I had lost a few pounds, but was not about to get back on a bike right away, and anyway, my arm was in a sling for 6 weeks, so no activity at all. But, I was more motivated than I had been. So I set out walking, and decided to do just a bit of jogging as well. To play it safe (and not trip and reinjure my arm), I went to a nearby high school track. That worked, so I slowly jogged more and more, doing intervals of walking and jogging until gradually the intervals began to coalesce into larger segments, and then one day, I didn’t need to walk anymore. I was ecstatic! I finally conquered running!

Once my arm healed up, I knew the best exercise would be swimming, so it’s not stressful on the joints and it builds up your stamina. So I joined a Life Time Fitness club that had just opened near me. Once I felt me arm was in a good place from swimming, I hired a Personal Trainer. I will underscore this: Hiring a Personal Trainer was the best thing I ever did. He taught me everything I didn’t know, from proper form to lift weights and the importance of developing your core, to proper spacing of workouts and a good amount of nutrition advice.

Throughout all of this I kept track of things, in Excel. Being 2004, it was the best tool at the time I could use. I’ll explain the graph a bit- there is a giant table below it, with columns for running, cycling, weights, swimming and cardio. Running is red, weights are yellow and swimming is blue, for reference, and that is what you see the most of. I worked out 5-6 times a week by this point. This chart shows 2005- I had a page for each year.

I lost 69 pounds in 7 months total, from the start of cycling until the early summer of 2005. It was transformational.

What kept me motivated, especially during the early days, were statistics. I’m kind of crazy about them- I love my metrics. I kept track of all my workouts- running, swimming, weightlifting and even some biking eventually, and used standard formulas to estimate the caloric spend. You can see part of my 2005 chart in the header image at the top. The different colors represented different workouts- red was running, blue was swimming, yellow was weightlifting, etc…

Tracking my workouts this closely and trying to improve, lose and outdo is an example of Gamification. Frequently gamification refers to challenges between two or more people. In my case, I usually just choose myself, as I strive to set a personal best or record distance for the hear, and so forth.

In late 2005 I got my first wearable- a Garmin Forerunner, so I could track runs and rides. And from there, I got into the Quantified Self and Quantified Fitness. Seeing the numbers, the exercise numbers correlating with weight loss (plus eating a healthy diet). You have to do both, or it won’t work.

Since then I’ve had a few periods of weight gain- it is always a bit of a struggle, but I’ve managed to not let it get so far and been able to reverse it. When I lived in Dallas, during this period of time, I had more time on my hands. Living in Santa Cruz and commuting to San Jose takes a chunk out of each day and I fell into a cycle of not working out. But I’m back on it and running a lot and working out at a local gym.

The woman in the photos above- she’s my wife now, and was my inspiration to finally do what it took to live a fitter life.