My name is Chris and this year I came aware of the QS movement.
I have been quantifying various aspects of my life for years and was actually considered a bit weird by some people for this practice! Glad to see there is actually a whole community with this “hobby”. The reason I quantify myself (mainly financial and health) is that of using this information to gain insights.
I do all my quantification manually, which as you surely know takes a lot of time and came to this forum to learn of the most effective manual ways to quantify health metrics and for suggestions on tools to automatize data collection.
As regards to health, Not as much as I would like, but mainly due to inconsistencies in my recording. Health recording is much more complex and has a lot of variables. One insight which is well-established is that lack of water leads to anxiety and constipation. Another is that the diuretic effects of stuff like coffee and tea is very inconsistent. Milk and protein (as a shake with water) seem to have a diuretic effect which is more consistent than either tea or coffee. Slight changes in temperatures (even if not perceived) lead to significant increases in urine output. Supplementation of magnesium citrate (which was taken to reduce anxiety) lead to massive spikes of anxiety. Not quite sure why, maybe it blocked absorption of calcium or iron (I have a documented deficiency of the latter). Coffee absorption seem to peak after 1.5 hours and affects my blood pressure mostly at that stage. Eating cashews does not seem to have relaxed me (as some nutrition websites claim). Iron supplements (which were prescribed by doctor following iron deficiency found in my blood tests) lead to headaches and I stopped them. Well, as you can see nothing exceptional… but as I said my recording was incomplete and intermittent.
Thanks to new tools available (and which I would like to read about and eventually buy), I could have a more complete set of data. I am interested in Heart Rate and any corresponding metric measuring because I am interested in seeing/finding correlation between stress/anxiety and the intake of several types of diets. I am also interested in finding ways to reliably measure cognitive improvements.
I am also a keen fan of Soylent which I find it ideal to reduce as much as possible the variables in diet and focus on a change in a single factor.