Biohacking: Exist.io – Track Everything Together
Exist.io is a plug and play site that can slurp up our health, productivity, sleep and diet data. Once all the data is in one place it makes it possible create some fascinating correlations. As soon as I plugged in my data two trends stood out for me to make actionable changes.
I believe the higher weight based on waking up earlier is based on the time of day I get on the scale. Lap swim is early at the pool so I finish earlier than a run and get on the scale earlier. Swimming is also a significantly lower duration and calorie burn than my runs.
I was happy to see some confirmation around other endurance tests I had been doing. The idea that running as slow as you can burns more fat than running at higher higher heart rates might be hard to grasp at first. I have done treadmill tests in labs to confirm and for now my home scale and smart watch agree that the lower effort exercise is a stronger link to weight loss.
What devices am I using to record all this data? Exist.io works with Google Fit and Apple Health which most health apps can send data directly to. I used the following devices where 4 out of 5 were going through the Apple Health App which shares data to the Exist.io iOS App.
The great thing about exist is that we can now integrate health data, see pretty charts and even get some suggestions for finding an optimal work / life balance. Using tags on top of these layers can provide further insights around food and drug sensitivities.
The one drawback I’ve run up against using Exist.io is that I like to work some very specific data. Each day I review my lowest resting heart rate, heart rate variability deep sleep vs rem sleep plus some blood and breath markers. At this time there is no automated tool that easily scrapes and displays that data through Exist so I’m manually entering data from different fitness tracking apps into a spreadsheet. It is my goal to move away from manual data entry and get as much passively collected data going as possible.
Example sleep data from cloud.ouraring.com
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