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Quantified Self Seattle, Oct 2013
- 5. why did I eat that??
- 6. How’d I do? 150 Total Inches 148 146 144 142 140 2011 2012 Date (Yr) 2013
- 7. No end in sight
- 11. Thank you! shelly.jang@gmail.com @shellyjang
Editor's Notes
- In 2011, I was deep in my second year of PhD program, and I was stressed out. There were days where I’d never see the light of day because I went to school before sun came up and left the campus long after sun had set. I knew this wasn’t good and my research was hard, I was suffering from all the key symptoms of the imposter syndrome, my self-esteem was so low. And at that time, I didn’t want the external factors to dominate my psychological and physical health. I had to reign in at least one aspect of my health. So after passsing the qualifying exam, I set a new year’s resolution to get fit. As a young woman, I was no stranger to constant diet and exercise fits so I knew that dividing up the goals into smaller tasks was key. Also, I’m an engineering nerd, so I knew I had to make this quantitative.
- So here it was. I defined a metric, which I called the Total Measurement Inches, which was the sum of circumference of various parts of my body like waist, hips, and legs. And the goal was to decrease this number b ONE each month. Simple right?
- And I was going to achieve this goal by two prong attack. I planned to exercise 6 times a week, for an hour at a time. As for my diet, I calculated using various resources the maximum amount of calories I can consume per day given my activity level, which was 1450. So every meal I’d write down what I ate, and how much calorie it had, wrote down what kind of exercise I did, and every 7 days, I”d measure myself and keep track of it.
- First of all, when I looked at the ddaily caloric intake, I was reassured to find out that I had not strayed too frequently from the guidelines as far as the number goes. But I was curious about what KIND of food I was eating and in what relative freqeuncy. so I decided to parse out the text from my email and chart up a word cloud.
- So here it is, It’s pretty standard, I ate a lot of turkey chicken and eggs, burger shows up prominently, but that’s because the word garden burger got separated, and also same for the hardboiled eggs. But what surprised me themost is the word “cheese” showed up very prominently! Full disclosure, I am lactose intolerant and I’m not supposed to have any dairy. So the fact that I was WRITING it down and still having cheese? says something about how blind I can be to something right in front of you/
- How did I do in the Total Measurement Index? Pretty well, actually. So here’s the data form November of 2010 to April of 2011. I did have a “soft start” to my new year’s resolution around Thanksgiving because I had been enjoying all the harvest feast. But come 2011, the numbers went down. But why did this stop there? Because I had gotten completely burnt out. I was sick of writing myself email 4~5 times a day to keep track of my food, looking at the label, and being HUNGRY constantly. 1450 is not a lot, no matter what women’s fitness magazine tells you. And I was spending upwards of 2 hours per day at the gym. I was finished.
- Why did this happen? It was a fun project, but I had forgot to set an END goal. I knew what I wanted to do each month, but I didn’t have a plan to stop. What did I expect to happen? to whither away into nothing ness after 11 years (that’s roughly how long it would’ve taken if you extrapoalte the data)... So after two months of stopping the regimen, I had ended up where I started My story isn’t all that unique, there are more new year’s resolution that gets abandoned than not.
- The truly interesting aspect of self-logging presented itself when I had least expected it. As I was doing the analysis more than two years later – this was right after the last meet up when I got super pumped about sharing my experience – I discovered these notes that I had made, and basically sent to myself, in the emails. words like “Fail”, or “starve” were discovered. This was disheartening to me. I discovered that two years ago, and probably still, I am a bully, to myself. I would never ever say these things to my friends, and here I had a proof of being mean to myself, clear as a day.
- The truly interesting aspect of self-logging presented itself when I had least expected it. As I was doing the analysis more than two years later – this was right after the last meet up when I got super pumped about sharing my experience – I discovered these notes that I had made, and basically sent to myself, in the emails. words like “Fail”, or “starve” were discovered. This was disheartening to me. I discovered that two years ago, and probably still, I am a bully, to myself. I would never ever say these things to my friends, and here I had a proof of being mean to myself, clear as a day.
- So I got curious, how often do I exhibit this kind of behavior? and if I’m mean and hungry do I also behave such a way with my friends and colleagues? This part of the project is largely incomplete. In the past three days I read a tons of tutorial on natural language processing and sentiment analysis. And here is what I have so far. I went through my gchat logs starting from 2011 in one month at at time. I applied the text to sentiment analysis dictionary commercially available on the web, and determined how muchof the conversation I was having was neg. , pos. or neutral. And here you can see, that large portion of the trend is in the negative region. And about equal amount of positive and neutral. Now this is a really rough analysis, and I’m pretty sure that as a sarcastic person, the computer dictionary really doesn’t get my humor. But I’m planning on extending this analysis further and tried to break it down to different groups of people that I chat with, friends or co workers. vs different week of the day. etc.
- Thanks. I’m also looking for a collaborator/tutor for javascript and D3 right now. I have a personal project to build a dashboard and mathematica hasn’t been cutting it for me.