Posts made in February, 2013

Going for Edison’s record…

Posted by Kelly Myers on Feb 27, 2013 in Background | 0 comments

Whether it is fact or simply a legend there is a story about Thomas Edison that resonates with me. He was asked how he continued to persist in his attempts to invent the light bulb after failing thousands of times.  Edison supposedly answered, “I have not failed.  I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

I have spent the past 27 years trying to find the right formula to be healthier.  At times the motivation was to lose weight, to be healthier, to improve my lipid profile or to eliminate antihypertensive medications.  Whatever the motivation, I do feel that I successfully identified well over 10,000 ways that did not work for me.  Some of the more remarkable failures ranged from “juicing vegetables”, walking over 200 miles in a month to an ER visit due to dehydration after a two hour stint on the StairMaster. Yet, for 26 of the 27 years I continued to gain and lose the same 15 pounds over and over again as my lipid levels rose, a fatty liver condition developed, prediabetes, and resistant hypertension emerged despite being on three different medications to control it.  Many of the things I tried are well documented methods to be healthier and have worked for thousands.  They just did not work for me.

This past year I have found a fairly simple, healthy change in my behaviors that has accounted for an 18% improvement in my lipid profile, a loss of 50 pounds, a healthy liver, normal glucose levels, and my blood pressure to being in control on one medication.  This change was easier and less rigid than many of the things I had tried and failed.  It was just the right change for me.

For those that don’t know me, I tend to immerse myself into projects like this one.  I became an obsessive record keeper after all I am a healthcare big data guy.  Daily tracking my blood pressure, routinely tracking my labs, a “Fitbit” to tract every step, and “Lose it” to capture everything I ate.  However, I could not find a resource to help me integrate and analyze this information.  Physicians were only really interested in the clinical data.  Nutritionists gave only a passing review of the Lose It data before they wanted me to adopt their newest plan and no one really cared to look at the Fitbit data.  Professionals have become so specialized they seldom expand their purview beyond their key metrics.  For example, my primary care physician did not run a lipid panel because she knew I was seeing a cardiologist and thought lipid management was his domain of expertise.  Manually and by brute force I found a pattern in the data that gave me a few hints as to what changes might work for me.  I tried them and they worked.

I cannot help but to think that there are relatively easy changes that are right for every individual.  Others would happily make them, if they knew what they were.  I am not talking about totally changing your diet or training like an olympic athlete.  I think there are small changes that everyone can make that are “worth the trouble of making the change”.  Would it be possible to pool our data and utilize modern data mining techniques to help find the high yield changes that have worked for others which might help us? Could this type of analysis help answer, “What are the small changes that I am willing to make in my life that will have the largest impact on my overall health?”