The Experiment Begins
on September 5, 2009
When I decided to start riding my bike to work last year, I knew it would take time for it to become a lasting habit (rather than just another failed attempt to get "back in shape"). The older I get, the more difficult it is to find the time and motivation to exercise. Intellectually, I know exercise is good, but it doesn't help when I spend hours and hours exercising and don't see any obvious "results" of my efforts.
When I was younger, I could simply contemplate the possibility of losing weight, eat a half gallon of Breyer's ice cream, and drop 5 pounds. Now that I am well into my 30's, I can exercise for an hour a day for two weeks straight and...nothing seems to happen. It's frustrating. It's a lot of work for minimal concrete return.
Having gone through this demotivating cycle a few times, I decided to focus on something besides my weight. I started logging the miles I rode my bike. This provided me with a more productive focal point. And it worked (for 6 months...more about that later).
I created a chart in Excel to track my weekly miles and total miles.
Since falling off the wagon last fall, I've recently started riding my bike again. I've also starting walking more, partly for variety and partly because it counts towards my Health 2.0 Experiment. I'll be using free (and inexpensive) tools to track my exercise and manage my health. Walking is a great place to start because it's affordable and most people can do it. We can all participate in health care reform. It doesn't all have to be top-down. To that end, I purchased a $32 pedometer for the purposes of tracking my walking activity using "Health 2.0" tools. Please note that spending money is not a requirement. I will let you know if I think it's worth spending more than $5 (or any money at all) on a pedometer. After all, the tools I'll be using, including Microsoft HealthVault, do not require a pedometer. You can record your exercise in other ways.
Comments
Me too!
Hi, Cindy. It just so happens I started on a Health 2.0 effort myself a couple of months ago. Actually I decided to commit to a few health habit changes for the rest of my life, and because I'm a supporter of H2.0 it has become a kind of experiment with technologies that might emerge to support much needed health behavior change society-wide in the near future.
So I'm interested in following what you're doing and maybe contributing my own experience in some way. In any case I hope to see more from you on this project in the near future. (By the way, I'm also a follower of your tweets, a tool I've been thinking about as way of supporting personal health knowledge.)
Hi David!
I'd love to hear about your experiences. You are more than welcome to blog here, share presentations or video, and/or provide feedback and comments!
I'm curious about your thoughts on using twitter for personal health knowledge. I'm using @stepsperday as one way to log my daily steps, but it's one of the many tools out there that will require a certain amount of users to evolve and become more engaging.
I like the idea of imagining the tools I want (in a way it looks like Don Kemper and Leslie Kelly Hall's Virtual Health Home Dashboard - I'll try to post a blog about it soon) and piecing together existing technology as a way to encourage truly "user-driven" tool development. Also, I hope to illustrate the need for data standards and interoperability. Those words make people's eyes glaze over, but right now, this is a huge obstacle to consumer engagement that is receiving surprisingly little attention.
Thanks for the welcome, Cindy
Yes, I'd like to participate in the discussion of Health 2.0 and especially avenues to using the ever-changing technology environment and culture to promote "health" (a word that needs deep discussion all by itself). I have a blog (and, hopefully, a vlog) called The Vortex that I'll be doing most of my blogging in, but I'd be glad to share the information about health and medicine on Open Health. For now I'll just sketch in a little more of my background.
I have an MPH in health education and have been working for the American Cancer Society for the past 35 years (I usually get a gasp! at that mention of that longevity), but I'm retiring December 31 at age 64. I started thinking about retiring a couple of years ago and then early in 2009 a colleague of mine who had been retired for only 12 months suddenly died. He was a few years older, but it rattled me and confirmed a growing sense that you need to enjoy your life while you can because ya never know when it'll be over.
Health behavior has always been a conundrum for me. It's never been as straight forward as you might think. People are more complex and our environment is more complex than academic models consider. I started work when the first efforts to reduce smoking began. On the one hand I'm amazed at how much progress has been made with the heavy hammer of laws and taxes in many states, but I'm dumbfounded that while we feud over who to blame for our health care mess and its costs we still permit cigarettes as a legitimate product in America. Has any taxpayer stood up in a town hall meeting and screamed at a legislator about how much we're all paying for the aftermath of decades of smoking? Oh, maybe that should have been me.
About two months ago I decided to make two modest commitments: 1) to devote 30 minutes/day to exercise or other health benefit, and 2) to reduce my wine consumption to 2 glasses/day. Having been through the boom and bust of diet and exercise several time before I've learned to keep my expectations modest and to be patient. It took years to get this tire around my gut, and it's not going to go away overnight. So far I've kept faithfully to my program and have seen lost weight, greater endurance and (according to my wife) better sleep behavior. I'm not expecting miracles, but I am pleased to see that while you can't stop the hands of time (that's getting to be a more urgent thought) you can make a positive impact on your body anytime.
Because I'm kind of geeky about technology I've been trying to use things currently available to prop up my program. I've got a HealtVault account and I renewed my cellphone contract by getting an iPhone. I'll be talking much more about those things in the future. But for now I've said enough. I'll be looking forward to dialoguing with you. David