I’m now four months into my health journey, in this update, I’d like to announce the launch of my Health Dashboard, which I’m making public in order to keep myself honest. I also want to discuss some analysis of the data so far in relation to my progress.
General Update
Overall, I feel my progress has been going in the right direction. I’m still swimming 3 days a week, and I have been doing some pilates lesssons (which hurt big time, but I know are good for me). Probably need to more regularly do my back exercises as they have dropped off a bit, but I am dancing tango more regularly. In fact, I’ve noticed a significant improvement in my tango fitness. 3 or 4 months ago, I was finding that I’d be wrecked at the end of every dance (“tanda” for those who know tango), but lately, I’ll happily dance 2, 3 even sometimes 4 tandas in a row before I need a break, and I don’t feel as wrecked afterwards.
Health Dashboard - Tracking
As I promised in my previous 2 posts, I really want to provide transparency into my progress, mainly to keep
myself honest. The best way I could think of doing this is to make the raw data available. For the past few years
I’ve used a Garmin 955 Solar watch to track my swims, steps,
general activity, and the odd workout. I also use the Garmin mobile app and website to track my weight and blood
pressure. While I could just copy/paste graph images from that, I’d like to mis-quote a character from
Start Treck Lower Decks
and say “We don’t trust Starfleet Garmin data. It’s too nuanced and thorough”. As a result, I’ve teamed up with Claude
Code to create a personal Health Dashboard specifically tailored to the exact data that I
wish to track (and am willing to share publicly). It’s broken up into 3 sections: Vital Statistics - Weight and Blood Pressure; Swimming - Tracking
distance, pace, heart rate for swims; and General Activity - covering Steps and intensity minutes. I have created
dedicated filters to help understand the data better. The default filter is “Since Jan 2026” given that this is
when I started this journey. Then I have monthly filters for the individual months of this year, and an All Data flter. While the All Data filter makes the charts a bit crowded, it still does have some valueble information.
Analysis
Data is meaningless without some analysis, so here are my thoughts on the data so far.
Weight
Since Jan 2026, I’ve been going in the right direction (i.e. down) albeit slowly. While I would dearly love my weight-loss to move faster, I also don’t want to do anything crazy, or put myself on a strict diet that I’ll only keep to until I hit a goal, and then put it all back on when I re-open the flood gates. I want to concentrate on deliberate life-style changes that are sustinable long-term, more about this in a later post.
If you look at “All Data” you’ll see a period between July 2025 and October 2025 where there are no entries. I like to call this the “Void of Dispear”. Around this time, my weight continued to increase, and I became so ashamed of it that I stopped recording my weight, and eventually stopped weighing myself all together. The chart doesn’t show it, but I actually got close to 120kg over this period. In October I decided that this strategy was self-defeating, and that I needed to start recording my weight again.
Blood Pressure
While it is dificult to see any dramatic improvement since January 2026, I have noticed small improvements, especially in Diastolic, which is now regularly under the 80mmgh mark. This is a really good sign. I have even had 1 recent Systolic measure of 118mmHg, the lowest since I started keeping records. The trend becomes obvious when you look at “All Data” where you can see the downward progression of both Diastolic and Systolic measurements.
Swimming
I have decided to track a number of different things for my swimming. Firstly, distance of each swim. This is quite telling. If you look at the data since Jan 2026, you can see a gradual increase over that time. If you view All Data, it becomes obvious when prolonged asthma attacks have kept me out of the pool. You can also see that each time, it takes a while to build my fitness back up to be able to swim further.
Next I’m tracking Average pace (per 100m), and Best pace (per 100m). This measure seems to vary quite a lot, and I’m guessing it’s got a lot do with factors like: How well I slept the night before; How energetic I am; whether I’m going for speed or distance, and how much I’m willing to push myself on the day. It’s also important to note that the y-axis is inverted, which means higher is better. I can’t really distinguish any real pattern there at the moment, but it is telling to look back at All Data, and it becomes obvious that I was in a pretty good place at the beginning of 2024, and I’m not yet back to my peak.
Mext is Max Heart Rate. Not sure how useful this is, it could be a sign of how much I’ve pushed myself on the day; an indication of how much my hypertensive heart disease is affecting me; or it could show an over time fitness improvement. I’ll wait for a few more months to see more data.
Finally, fastest 100, and fastest 400. Again, the y-axis is inverted, so higher implies better. Again, this has the same variability as average and best pace, and I can observe the same basic things, i.e. I was at my peak back at the beginning of 2024, and I’m slowly building back up to that.
General Activity
I’m tracking 2 main things here: Steps (weekly total and daily average) and intensity minutes (per week). Both of these are automatically tracked by my Garmin watch. The first thing that jumps out at me is that there has been only margnial improvement in the number of steps I do since I started back in January. In fact there have only been 3 weeks where I’ve clocked over 70,000 steps. I think this is one area I can try to focus a bit more on. The other interesting thing that I notice if I view all data is that from Jan - Dec 2024, I was walking significantly more than I have been since. The only thing I can put this dow to is that in 2024, my son was attending the Junior campus of North Melbourne primary school which is about 150 steps further away from where we live than the senior campus where he goes now. That means every day I was forced to do an additional 3000 steps of incidental exercise that I no longer need to do.
The intensity minutes tells a similar story, all pointing to me being more active during 2024, and then a noticable decline from 2025 onwards. interesting that the beginning of 2025 is when I first really started to notice my health issues, so it may be just as much that as anything else.
What’s Missing
While my Garmin watch can automatically track steps, has dedicated swim tracking, gym workout tracking, run tracking (yeah, not doing that), and can derive intensity minutes from this data, the one thing it doesn’t track is my tango. I am making a determined effort to increase my tango from once a fortnight if I’m lucky to once a week or more. I discussed the success I had with maintaining a good healthy weight even with not great diet in my previous post. The truth is, I’d much rather do tango than go to a gym, so it is an important part of my exercise regime. It’s probably (or at least the lack of it) a contributing factor to my loss in core fitness. To botch another Star Trek quote… “Live long and Tango”.
