If something is truly important, then we should know how we’re doing with it. There’s a quote from management guru Peter Drucker that says: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. In practice, there are things we can improve without measuring, but we may not realize, appreciate, or benefit from the improvement. We may also miss indicators that something important is falling apart until it’s too late.
Most people agree that good health should be a priority, and there’s no shortage of “health before wealth” quotes out there to help remind us. Existing technologies make it easy to track useful health metrics without going to see the family doctor every day, and from personal experiences, these metrics can help avoid serious life-altering health problems.
I purchased a home blood pressure monitor in June 2021 after some experiencing some recurring headaches. I never had any significant headaches before that couldn’t be traced back to some specific trauma to the head, so I needed more data. The blood pressure numbers were eye-opening (image below):
My average blood pressure indicated Stage 1 hypertension with some individual readings during the day showing Stage 2, which wasn’t good. The remote working environment brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic was taking it’s toll as I was pretty much sitting in front of a computer working from 5:00am to 11:00pm each day with about 4 hours of non-work time built in during the day to cook, eat, get the kids ready for school and take care of housework essentials. If someone had asked me if I felt stressed, I honestly would have answered “no, just busy”, but the data disagreed. On Aug 4, 2021, I was part of a series of lay-offs, which was really a blessing as my blood pressure and other health indicators started to improve significantly.
It can be hard to take a step back or slow down when there’s work to be done, but there’s always work to be done. I’ve had colleagues in the past who had likely worked themselves to death with long hours and sacrificed sleep so I was aware that the risks are real, but knowing without acting doesn’t improve the situation. One colleague was found in his office, and one was only in his 30’s and otherwise healthy. The occurrence of working to death is common enough to have been given a name. The Japanese call it “Karoshi”, and in China the word is “Guolaosi”. It’s statistically rare, so unfortunately, very few people believe it will happen to them. If it does, it’s too late.
Resting heart rate is an indicator of cardiovascular health that my fitness watch tracks automatically so I don’t have to do anything other than charge it and wear it. It’s easy data to collect, so there’s a lot more data than there is for my blood pressure.
Process improvement tip: good metrics are meaningful, accurate, timely, actionable, and easy to get. If we have metrics that aren’t driving improvements, then we’ve missed the boat on one of those characteristics.
My heart rate data can be seen below. There are two different looking screenshots because I switched apps in October 2021, but similar to the blood pressure data, a distinct improvement can be seen after Aug 4 with bpm steadily coming down from 67 bpm to 62 bpm by the end of the first month. As of Jan 2022, my resting HR was holding steady around 56 BPM.
Other health indicators that inspired behaviour changes were body weight, body fat % (both measured with the same scale) and cholesterol level (from a blood test taken during my annual physical every 3 years). I was admittedly aware of the weight and fat % creeping up since COVID and remote working kicked in early 2020, but the cholesterol level was a surprise because it was fine during my previous annual check-up, in 2018.
For 20 years, my weight had hovered around 190 lbs with 21% body fat, but after just 16 months of remote working, convenient snacking and reduced exercise that started in 2020, I hit a peak of 227 lbs and 29% body fat, which meant I had put on 37lbs of weight with 26 lbs of it being fat. That’s the equivalent of a grocery bag full of fat, or, imagine drinking six 2-litre bottles of pop but instead of pop, the bottles were full of human fat. It’s a mental image I found useful for motivating my weight loss goals so I’m sharing it in case anyone else finds gross mental imagery motivating.
With cholesterol, anything above 6.3 mmol/l is considered high risk for cardiovascular disease and stroke. Mine came back with a sinister result of 6.66. I took that as a bad sign.
The changes I made included a 5k run training program and sustainable diet changes which involved moderating without completely blacklisting any specific foods. This means pizza night and birthday cake are still fair game as long as I eat like one person instead of two, or three. I also had to add a new word to my vocabulary… “leftovers”. Everybody has different calorie in vs out baselines, but any increase in activity or reduction of calories consumed from the baseline will make a difference. My changes were significant, but not extreme, consuming about 500 calories less per day while burning 300 more on average by running 2 hours per week. Interestingly enough, the additional 2 hours per week were completely offset by reduced snack acquisition, snack prep, snacking, and snack clean up time. This net reduction of 800 calories per day led to a consistent weight loss of 1 to 2 lbs per week, except during Christmas, where I just managed to break even. Considering the weight gained during the previous holidays, I was pretty happy with breaking even.
Weird eating tip: Sometimes when I eat I’ll swallow a few extra times without actually swallowing all the food. This seems to give my food brain a little more satisfaction compared to normal swallowing and less cravings overall. If anyone tries this, let me know if it does anything for you, or if it’s just me.
With the additional running and eating behaviour changes, by February 2022 I was down to 198lbs and 21% body fat, which meant the successful expulsion of 11 of my 12 litres of added fat, and still continuing to expel. I’m still waiting for my cholesterol retest, and really hoping to avoid starting on medication to control my cholesterol.
Finally, circling back to the original issue, which is important to do but easy to forget, my headaches have gone away.
The challenge with many health and safety related metrics is convincing people to do something about a serious problem that may or may not happen when there’s already so many things to do. Unfortunately, when health problems happen, they can be immediately life-changing with time-consuming treatments, costly medications, permanent disabilities, or worse.
If health is truly important, then it’s worth measuring and using those measurements to celebrate the good while preventing the bad.