The Personal Health Experiment: Designing an Experiment that Gets you Healthy (Part 2)
If all of your prior attempts to get healthy didn’t work or didn’t stick, there are good reasons for it. I wrote about it in Part 1 of this 2-part series on the Personal Weekly Health Experiment. In this post, I’ll share how you can start taking action.
A Personal Weekly Health Experiment is essentially a set of small activities you try out in 7-day increments.
The purpose is to find healthy activities that we’ve determined we can do, decided that we like, and that get us results. The process goes like this: decide what healthy activity you want to make a habit, check, and apply the scientific method to your progress. After 7 days, you evaluate the results, make adjustments, and begin another 7-day experiment.
As we continuously personalize our activity sets, the activities turn into automatic habits. Through repetition, we get to the point of choosing what’s healthy for us by default.
There are three simple steps to each experiment:
Step 1: Create a hypothesis
During this first step, you pick what you want to try doing more or less of and form a thesis. The operating assumption is that making this choice will directly impact a particular metric (eg. steps) and indirectly, over time, influence the main goal (eg. weight).
Say, for example, you want to lose 20 pounds. You want to test out the impact of moving more. Getting off the train one station early before work will add 15 minutes to your commute and increase your weekly step count. This is doable.
Ask yourself these questions to filter what test you’d like to run:
What am I trying to change, discover, solve?
When am I trying to make this change or attempting to do something new? Do I have enough opportunities in the next 7 days to get measurable data?
Is this doable? If this does work, would I do more of it? Do I think this is achievable? Could I see myself turning this into an automatic habit?
Step 2: Build a Framework / Setup Experiment
Now it’s time to create structure around your chosen activity. You’ll want to define:
- Healthy Activity — Move More, Walk 5% more week over week
- Time Frame — 7 days
- Frequency — 4 times this week I will walk more during my commute
- Measurements — Steps / Minutes walking
- Direct goals — Steps / Active minutes
- Indirect goals — Weight loss
Let’s go back to the sample goal of losing 20 pounds. In the next 7 days, you’ll get off the train early on your way to work twice, on Tuesday and Thursday. Google Maps says the walk is a quarter-mile and my phone says this was 850 steps; record the distance or steps under “Direct Goals.” Since weight loss is your “Indirect Goal” metric, you’ll also step on the scale to understand this along with any other healthy activities impacting my indirect goal of weight loss.
Step 3: Analyze Data, Evaluate Results and Communicate Decision
Again, whether you can make the change and like the change matters to sustainability, so you’ll ask the following questions at the end of the 7 days:
Did I complete the experiment? If yes, how hard/easy was it to accomplish?
How did it make me feel? Did it impact my energy or decision making?
Did I enjoy it? Is this something I want to do more of?
What were my metrics? What did I measure directly, and what did I measure indirectly?
What will I do for the next 7 days?
- Stop / Pause
- Rollover / Continue
- Increase / Modify
You walked as planned. Fifteen minutes felt longer than you expected, but you noticed a boost in focus those mornings. You were a half-mile-walk / 1,250 steps healthier this week than the week prior (direct measurement) and maintained your weight (indirect measurement). Because you felt some foot pain after Thursday’s walk, you want to roll over the distance and frequency of your walks next week.
Create a thesis, build a framework, then evaluate. Rinse and repeat every 7 days. That’s how the Personal Weekly Health Experiment works. Whatever activities you choose to measure directly, the fact that you’re “getting healthy” will be indisputable just as long as you keep experimenting.
With “Can I?” and “Do I like it?” part of the selection criteria, staying with experiments will be more comfortable than any other approach to healthy living you’ve tried to keep up before.
And if losing 20 pounds is what you’re after, healthy habits that turn into automatic habits are very likely to get you to that goal.
With the Personal Health Experiment, your weight loss framework follows the achievable rate of a typical weight gain rate, which is a few pounds a year. You start with aiming for .1 pound a week, a little less than half a pound a month.
The weight loss may only add up to 5.2 lbs (52 weeks X 0.1 lb per week) a year, which may not seem like a lot. But over four years, the loss will aggregate to 20.8 lbs. And by then, your “new normal” healthy choices will be more familiar to you than your old choices.
If you’re excited by the concept of a Personal Weekly Health Experiment, but your roadmap to “getting healthy” still feels unclear, I have an invitation for you.
My co-founder and I created Lever Health to help people who are trying to be healthier. We are looking for people who want support with setting up their first Personal Weekly Health Experiments. Our concierge and Health Coaches will be guiding you through:
- Discovering new things that could work to make me healthier
- Answering the question, “Does this work for me?”
- And if it does work, “Is this something that I want to keep working on with QH until the new choices turn into an automatic habit, and become the “new normal”?
You will work with Lever Health to try 3 healthy activities each week and to get personalized help on setting up and tracking the metrics via Apple Health (iOS).
If you’d like to stop asking yourself, “Why does getting healthy have to be complicated?” then sign up for our waitlist and join us in the next round of Personal Weekly Health Experiments.
Getting healthy can be simple. All you need is a data-driven method that assumes you’re one-of-a-kind. And you are.
