2023 Personal Health Score Year in Review
What I Learned from Another Year of Detailed Health Tracking
Welcome to Trynotsuck Tuesday: A snapshot of habits, lessons, and tools I’m using to not suck at life
Another year of health tracking is in the books.
Yes, my spreadsheet is obsessive.
But I love it because it allows me to objectively see how my health is changing from one year to the next.
Here’s what I learned tracking a dozen health metrics for 365 days in a row in 2023:
2023 Personal Health Score Year in Review
My personal health score for 2023 was 97% (using my 2023 targets).
Changing one cell shows the same display for 2022.
That score was 91% (also using my 2023 targets).
There was clear improvement in all areas except for sleep, which was unchanged.
Daily average stats:
2022
Nutrition: 4.5 servings fruits/veggies
Sleep: 7.2 hours
Steps: 9,898
Exercise: 14.6 minutes
2023
Nutrition: 4.7 servings fruits/veggies
Sleep: 7.2 hours
Steps: 10,760
Exercise: 20.1 minutes
The stat I'm most proud of is exercise.
This past year, I made it a point to incorporate more zone 2 cardio and soccer in addition to strength training.
As a result, my average daily exercise minutes increased by nearly 50% from 2022 and I averaged nearly 2.5 hours a week.
I also added a tab to my spreadsheet that summarizes and conditionally formats several habits on a daily basis.
Its purpose is to detect more subtle patterns like which days of the week I performed better than others.
This is useful for targeting opportunities for improvement.
For example, I learned:
I eat significantly fewer fruits/veggies on the weekends
My least active day of the week is Sunday
I tend to eat less protein on Sundays
I tend to eat more fat on Saturdays
If I close these gaps, I will improve my weekly averages.
For 2024, my average daily targets are the same except for one:
Nutrition: 4.5 servings (up from 4)
Sleep: 7.4 hours
Steps: 10,000
Exercise: 18 minutes
Sleep is the area with the biggest gap between where I am (7.2 hours per night) and where I want to be (~7.5).
Here's what I'm using to track these metrics (before copying into Excel):
Body fat: @fitbit Aria 2 scale
Nutrition: Awesome Habits app
Sleep: @ouraring
Steps/exercise: Apple Watch
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Great job, thanks for sharing this! Your methodical tracking is inspiring. I do something similar, but I find nutrition tracking to be the biggest challenge. I see you mention that you use the Awesome Habits app for tracking nutrition...is that where you get your macros (protein / fat, etc.) as well, or just where you track # of servings? I used MyFitnessPal and I find it a bit of a chore, especially if I cook a new recipe for the first time and then need to create that recipe so I can then track. If you have any posts specific to your nutrition tracking, I'd love to see. Thanks again and keep up the great work!