What Happened When I Gave GPT My Health Data

Today’s article is going to be a personal one. There has been a lot of talk about how to successfully utilize the power of all that intelligence that sits in LLM’s such as GPT, Claude or Gemini. I have shared it many times before but I will keep repeating it as it is such a potential unlock. It is not about the tools, it’s about your own mindset shift. You really need to start thinking differently and what I mean by that is as followed. Every time, you have a question, think of your favorite LLM first. This goes for anything you do related to work, but also with regards to life. Let me share some examples on both below.

Work examples:

“I want to change xyz in my Beehiiv newsletter”
- I don’t go and search through FAQ’s or Google answers, I have GPT explain to me how to do it.

“I need a system prompt in order to create a GPT that is focused on web3 marketing on X, include best practices and examples”
- We go back in forth a couple of times on perfecting it but from that moment on I have a strong foundation for every conversation.

“I need a system prompt for a custom GPT for my new client”
- For every new consultancy client I have I create a new custom GPT. The GPT is aware of my role, our goals, my responsibilities and I add relevant information to it in PDF form. Now I can use it effectively as a sparringspartner whenever I need to,

Life examples:

“I have a small wasp nest forming in my backyard, should I let it sit or move it?
- took a picture and asked GPT, he advised to move it and explained how to do it safely. 

“From all of the muesli’s in this picture which ones is the healthiest and why?”
- Took a picture in the grocery store. GPT gave me a breakdown of all the nutrition elements in each so I could quickly make the best decisions instead of reading every package myself.

“We found a wounded squirrel in the backyard, here is a picture, what should we do”.
- it advised us how to proceed (carefully), biggest surprise? DON’T give it water.

And then there are the small general things. Whenever I see something in a movie or show that I don’t know exactly what it is, quick GPT search gives me a great answer.

It made life a lot easier in a lot of situations haha! And no, I don’t think it made me dumber. On the contrary, I actually learned a lot of new things that I did not know about before because of it.

So how did I end up with a full time nutritionist and physical coach?

I moved to Bali September last year, it’s been amazing. One of the incredible things about this island is the level of food. It’s super diverse, high quality, healthy and (very) affordable. Eating out / ordering in became my new norm.

On the other hand. All my life I have struggled with weight, something I have written about before (click). During COVID I completely lost myself, both mentally and physically. The result was that I weighed in at 115kg when I decided I needed to change something.

I now weigh around 87-89kg depending on the day. It has been a long journey. Loosing weight is not easy, it’s a constant battle, whatever I eat there is a voice in my mind that is taking everything into consideration.

This is actually the second time that I lost that much weight, the big difference now is that it’s become much more of a general health lifestyle for me than just “I want to loose weight” journey. There is no goal, no specific number, no end date for me. I just want to be the best version I can be, both mentally and physically (and yes they definitely go hand in hand), for as long as I can be (longevity).

When I arrived in Bali I weighed around 92-95kg. I started by just working out more, but not much changed. Then I thought about using ChatGPT for the first time. I would take a picture of the menu and ask GPT for the healthiest option to order. This escalated eventually 🤣.

I started adding more and more, let me now explain how I use it daily.

Health data

As I mentioned I am more on a healthy lifestyle journey than just a weight loss journey. Definitely inspired by my best friend, accelerated when he gifted me an Oura ring for my birthday 2 years ago. For the people who don’t know, Oura is is a smart ring. Mainly focused on tracking your sleep performance. I got hooked. Super intriguing to see what does and doesn’t have impact on your sleep quality. Sleep is the basis of everything, it is the number 1, most important, element when it comes to health and (both mental and physical) performance.

If you want to know why. Have a read: Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. I am warning you though, I stopped reading eventually as I got the message and it sometimes scared the shit out of me 🤣. Needless to say: Sleep is Important ❤️.

When I moved to Bali I also wanted to up my amount of training and workouts. I found an incredible gym and I started going 6 days a week. My routine:

Monday: Boxing
Tuesday: Strength Class
Wednesday: Boxing + Mobility + Jiu-Jitsu in the afternoon
Thursday: Jiu-Jitsu
Friday: Boxing
Saturday: Jiu-Jitsu

In order to not push myself to hard I wanted to get more data to help me. Oura is great for sleep but is not focused that much on training, recovery, workout tracking etc. (Plus wearing a ring while boxing is not ideal). So I decided that I wanted to add a Whoop.

Whoop is a wearable fitness tracker and health platform that monitors recovery, strain, sleep, and overall performance using continuous biometric data to optimize athletic and lifestyle decisions.

The last device I use is a digital scale to read out my weight, fat percentage, muscle % etc etc. It already all helped a lot, but I was still missing a lot of advice on how to interpret all the data I was receiving. Then I thought about utilizing GPT as my missing factor.

The mental switch.

I knew I needed to change things, especially when I noticed that my body would burn out after certain training sessions, I was sometimes even gaining weight, although my calorie intake was definitely below what I burned. To give you an example, during a good boxing session here on Bali I burn sometimes up to 8 or even 900 calories in an hour..

It was frustrating. Side note: The amount of “advice” you get from people when you start to loose weight (and they notice) is always funny. I know that most of them mean well, but everything depends on the person/circumstances in the end. I will never forget that someone came up to me once (when I was loosing a lot of weight the first time, around 2017) and said: “You know what you should do, only eat veggie soup, you will loose a lot of weight”. I mean, I bet you do, but am I going to eat veggie soup for the rest of my life? 🤣 

Back to now. Just to say, less calories in then out is a great start but when you already lost 20+ kg, as I did at that point, it’s not enough. It becomes precision work. And I lack the exact nutritional knowledge to do all of it myself, with every food decision I make. Besides, professional experts who can give you personalized advise and who you can message what to eat when you are not at home, are unaffordable for most of us.

The solution: AI

My routine now (call me crazy, but it works).

Forget prompt engineering, start context engineering (as shared in my post here). It clicked for me that I should give GPT as much context as I can about me, my body, my health, so that it can give me better advise. Additionally, I found a “Huberman GPT” that someone created, this GPT includes all the knowledge that is publicly shared by Andrew Huberman, he is an American neuroscientist and podcaster on all things health, nutrition etc that I have followed for years now. This way, I get extra in-depth knowledge on the things I find important.

All together, this resulted in the below routine.

Wake up:
I start by setting the stage for the day by sharing my Oura’s sleep and readiness scores and details + my Whoop’s recovery and health metrics. (App screenshots) I always start my prompt with something like: “Hi, it’s a new day, I just woke up”. In order to give a reminder to GPT that we are not still working on “yesterday”. Yes, I have those challenges 🤣.

Next I weigh myself on the digital scale, save the results on my phone and add it to the same GPT conversation as well.

If it’s a normal day I mention (when I share the initial data) what my plan for the day is in terms of workouts. When my data is “mwah” or low, I ask to advise me on how to potentially revise my ideas. Should I go hard or not, should I skip a class and go for a treadmill walk instead, etc. Helped me a lot to slow down when needed (I am not good at that 🤣).

I also sometimes need to remind it that I always train fasted. When I share my initial data it sometimes immediately starts recommending me breakfast etc.

Workout + Breakfast
Next step is breakfast. When I have breakfast at the gym I:
- Upload the Whoop data from my session
- Any recovery that I did (sauna/ice bath + electrolytes drink)
- Upload the menu of the gym

I then ask for advise on what to eat from the attached menu (which includes amount of calories that are in the meal), based on my workouts, all it knows about me, my data and my goals. What’s interesting here is that it helps me shift intake whenever I burned more or less calories then usual.

As I have the best girlfriend in the world, she happily cooks for me at home and has been willing to help me with my journey. Whenever we do this, I ask GPT for the recommended amounts (veggies/carbs/protein etc) for the options that we have at home.

Lunch
I repeat. If I am outside in a cafe working, I upload the menu and ask for a recommendation. If we stay at home and cook, I asked for recommended grams and share the options that we have.

Dinner
I repeat. If we order in, I make screenshots of the menu of where we want to order and ask GPT to pick for me. For all three meals I, if I don’t forget, take pictures of the meals and send them in the chat so GPT knows (and gets reminded again) what I have eaten.

This might all feel and sound like a lot, but it has been worth it for me. Besides this routine, the amount of insights I get from it are so valuable and it has really made me understand my body more and more. Some general things:

• When I see a sudden big move in weight/fat % or something else I can ask how come, what caused this. It gives me either calming advise (that it just might be water and not actual fat added) or other reasons, which we can then use to adapt.

• I have injured my shoulder (small tear in a rotator cuff muscle) and can ask it for advise on what to do/not to do, what it means, what could help it.

• If I feel a bit sick for example, I ask if sauna would help? If so, how long. Do ice bath yes or no, etc.

• If after a certain workout I feel something (pre-injury) I would describe it, ask it for advise. It helped me with recovery movements, sauna’s, massage recommendations etc.

A lot of these things I would just do depending on gut feel. That same gut feel is now getting a lot better as well as I get the information when GPT makes certain recommendations.

Some downsides
Because I use this so intensely, I also strongly feel where the AI still lacks or is just not what I want it to be (yet). Some points of frustration:

• Context window. It easily forgets things that happened yesterday, or that I always train fasted, etc. This obviously has to do with memory and context lengths, something that will get better in the future for sure. The ability to have a continuous conversation about all of this, without having to remind it of stuff every time, will make it so much easier to use and follow.

• One of the most annoying things is when I shared a picture of the menu and it completely ignores the menu and makes up dishes that are not on there. Makes me go crazy sometimes haha

• The occasional ignoring of my questions, recommending weird things all of a sudden, having to remind it to be strict with me etc.

The results
As I said earlier in the article, loosing more weight after you already lost 20-25kg is not easy. But, this hard work has been paying off slowly but surely. See below for some data. As you can see for my weight, it’s been dropping a lot more since April (the exact time my girlfriend arrived on Bali). The at home cooking helped a lot. But not because outdoor eating wasn’t good for me, but because the portions were too small for my amount of calorie burn. Another interesting insight I would not have expected.

In the end, we can debate on how good and precise the digital scales are but all I know is that there is a downtrend and an uptrend. How much I exactly weigh and what the percentages exactly are don’t matter that much imo. As long as they go down/up.

You might think I am crazy, you might think I let my life be controlled by data. I can ensure you, it is not. I strongly believe life is about balance. On weekend’s I sometimes let myself enjoy things some more. I have cheat days. If I go away for a weekend or visit a new city/country (like Malaysia), I eat what I want to try and taste. When I want a restart on Monday I tell GPT that I had a cheat weekend and we continue where we left off. I would highly suggest you do the same :).

Final thoughts
It’s been an incredible journey. I sometimes look in the mirror and notice “new muscles”, things I have never seen before in my life 🤣. It makes me feel proud.

I feel strong, I feel healthy. I have accepted a few years ago that I will always have to manage my weight, it is just a part of who I am. I never want to go back to where I was, it’s literally my biggest nightmare. But I know I am strong enough to prevent that from happening, especially now with the support of people so close to me and all the intelligence we are getting with AI.

I hope that all of the above has inspired you, or given you some ideas how to use AI to better your life as well. If you have any questions or need some more tips, feel free to hit me up for sure!

Much love and let’s keep pushing! ❤️ 

(please note: the above is not medical or health advise, I am the expert of my body and you are yours. I know all to well that there is no one solution for everyone’s challenge. All I hope it inspired you a bit to be the best version you can be ❤️)

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^{Over the years, I’ve navigated industries like advertising, music, sports, and gaming, always chasing what’s next and figuring out how to make it work for brands, businesses, and myself. From strategizing for global companies to experimenting with the latest tech, I’ve been on a constant journey of learning and sharing.}

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