A journey through nine years of health and activity data
A quick note before I start. All the data here is my own from nine years of tracking through Exist.io. I used an AI assistant to do the number crunching, build the charts and help draft the write-up. I have gone through the figures and edited the words myself. Owning my own data matters to me, and being honest about the tools I lean on feels like part of the same deal.
I track a fair bit about myself. Steps, sleep, mood and weight all flow into Exist.io from various apps and hardware I use on a daily basis. Most of the time I just glance at the numbers and move on. Exist emails me a summary every January. I finally sat down and analysed all of the data properly.
I've been a big guy for as long as I can remember. I slimmed down a bit in 2017/18 but it never stuck. I tried again a few years later but the saxophones just got louder and louder. It turns out I really like eating: the taste, the ceremony, everything about food excites me. I was brought up in a household that appreciated food, and it has really made an impact on my entire life.
This year I was too heavy for the big water slide at Centre Parcs which finally flicked a switch in my brain. I had to do something and something I did. Until July, I was mostly just trying to eat less, and move a bit more but the shape of the graph tells the story better than I can. There was a steady slope down through the spring and early summer. I started taking Wegovy pills in mid July (Mostly on a whim) and whilst I was losing about a third of a kilo on average a week before that has roughly doubled since. I still struggle a bit with the food noise, but it's so much better than it was before. I don't find myself 'eating for eatings sake' as much any more. I'm finding it diminishing as my dosage increases.
The little kick upward right at the end is the cruise we recently went on. Seven nights on a ship with a fully stocked buffet will do that. I expect the line to settle back down over the next couple of weeks now we are at home and not in the land of unlimited pizza and burgers.
The chart below is zeroed to my weight on New Year's Day, which means the line shows how much I have lost since then rather than any real figure.
The part I am quietly most pleased about does not show on the chart at all. My weight data goes back to 2017, and I was a good bit lighter than this in those early years, so I am not going to pretend this is uncharted territory. However I am now at my lowest in nearly six years, and given the direction things were heading last year I will happily take that.
Mood vs Steps
The second finding was interesting but not entirely unsurprising: I plotted my daily mood against how much I had moved that day, and got a strong correlation.
Below about four thousand steps my mood barely shifts. Once I get past six thousand it climbs, and my best days are consistently the ones over ten thousand.
The real surprise was what did not matter. I would have bet money that sleep was a big driver of my mood. It turns out that across around roughly eighteen hundred days, the link between my mood and my steps is clearly there while the link between my mood and my sleep is almost non-existent.
Nine years, by the numbers
While I was in there, I could not resist adding up a few totals. These go back to April 2017, when the tracking started.
I have walked over 18 million steps. At a rough three-quarter-metre stride that works out at around 8,400 miles. That's a long way!
I have slept for about 23,000 hours. That is 964 days, or nearly two years and eight months spent asleep across the last nine. My average night comes out at 7 hours 25 minutes.
The most steps I took in a day was 20,230 on the 11th January 2020, and it is still the only time I have ever gone past twenty thousand. I can't remember what I was actually doing then to be completely honest.
2026 is my happiest year on record, with a higher average mood than any other year I have logged. Things do be feeling better!
The stat I am oddly proudest of is the dullest. Across 3,423 days I have a reading of at least one metric on every single. Not a day missed in nine and a half years. That is either dedication or a mild affliction, and I am honestly not sure which. You decide which...
A few more that only a certain kind of person finds interesting, and if you have read this far, you are probably that kind of person.
My weekend mood is reliably higher than my weekday mood, and the fun part is that it has nothing to do with walking. Over the whole nine years I take almost exactly the same number of steps at the weekend as I do midweek. So whatever lifts my mood on a Saturday, it is not the exercise. Could it be the lack of work?
Monday is quietly my most active weekday and Friday my laziest. Monday and Tuesday were my office working days for a few years so this checks out.
February is my most active month of the year while October is my least, so it seems I hibernate a little in the autumn. I'll need to buck this trend this year.
My busiest month ever was January 2020, with just shy of 300,000 steps. That was clearly peak New Year. Things didn't continue though as we did not know what just around the corner. There is something quite funny about hitting my lifetime steps peak in the months before the whole country was told to stay indoors.
Sleep is easily my steadiest habit. Night to night it barely varies, and I sleep best on a Sunday and worst on a Tuesday.
Worth the faff?
I love data. I find it endlessly fascinating. My wife doesn't see the appeal! If you don't use it, then it is pointless. With the advent of AI, it has become so much easily to analyse information like this and produce insights and actionable targets. To produce the outline for this post, I used CSV export function in Exist.io and asked Claude what it thought.
If you're interested in logging this kind of data for yourself, check out my posts about Exist.io using the links below.
If you decide to give it a go, you can get an extra 30 days added to your trial by using my link and I get a $2 bill credit if you stick around!
This is post β¦ of #100DaysToOffload.
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