Thanks for visiting dunkbonds.com, the dormant Rails app I built to gamify charitable contributions toward personal goals, piloted around my goal to dunk. You'll notice I have made zero effort to update its style, so it still harkens back to its original 2011-era mint.com inspiration, when it was likely already looking pretty dated. Have a click around!
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October 04, 2012

Reviewing Sleep and Diet Data

About six weeks ago I posted about how I wanted to improve some of my habits by logging and reviewing the data.  Well, I should probably log how often I review data, because I finally got around to what I thought might be a weekly check-in.

In any case, for those of you (1?) who are interested, my findings are below (warning:  charts!)

Getting Enough Sleep

Earlier in the summer, I decided to start trying to get about eight hours of sleep most nights.  I started slow and built my way up into the habit.  So far, it has been reasonably successful.  Most nights I'm getting between seven and eight hours (not to mention, I feel pretty great as a result.) 

The dips represent travel weekends with a mixture of late nights and cute, little naps before heading to the airport at an ungodly hour.

Grade:  A-

Remembering to Eat

A common problem for muscle recovery is reaching what's known as a state of catabolism.  In short, if you don't supply yourself a steady stream of protein throughout the day, your body starts to break down muscle tissue.  Solution:  eat every 3-4hrs.  I created a simplified, linear model based on how much food I eat and when and can visualize the data in a timeline chart, excerpted below:


My goal here is to minimize the time that the red curve stays at zero, which grossly simplifies a catabolic state.

You may notice that the curves pop up around 4AM Tuesday and Wednesday.  Yep.  I woke up to eat.  Sort of.  I set an alarm to take some Branched Chain Amino Acids, which stave off catabolism, then went back to sleep.  I won't do this unless I'm in the swing of things.

Travel is tough, but regular weekends continue to be a problem, so I'll have to focus on those. 

Grade:  B-

Food:  Compliance to Plan

I try to eat in a manner in which I get by on mostly good fats & lean protein most of the time (plus non-grain veggies), and save my quick glycemic index carbs for the period after a workout.  This is the "plan."  I'm trying to get to about 85% compliance.  I rated each meal on a good/bad scale from +3 to -3, and here's how I did.

Granted, this takes into account some rough travel weekends, but overall, I'm about 2/3 compliant, with some room to improve for sure.  This is the one I feel the most regardless of data, but data keeps me objective.

Grade:  B- (taking in account traveling.  C+ otherwise.)

Conclusion:  It's working.  You should do it, too.


There.  I'll be continuing this habit, and it surprisingly doesn't take much effort to log with a google spreadsheet and its ability to create web forms (plus some analysis overhead).  I definitely encourage you to log what behavior you want to improve.