I hit rock bottom in April 2013. My weight had ballooned to 252 lbs., and eating had become a compulsion. I hated the way I looked and the difficulty I had moving around, and I especially hated the way I felt. I had tried everything (or so I thought) and had a 100 percent failure rate. But, luckily for me, 2013 was the height of the quantified-self hype-cycle, and there was no end to the number of fitness trackers and health and wellness apps coming to market. I started a journey.

The Initial Journey

From May through October 2013 I put myself on a 1,500-calorie-per-day diet and logged every morsel of food I put in my mouth using MyFitnessPal. I committed to purposeful walking 4 miles every morning (one hour per day), using Runkeeper and Spotify to keep my pace under 15 minutes per mile, and I lost 55 lbs. This was the most remarkable accomplishment of my life (to that point). I was so impressed with the impact that quantification had on my health and wellness that I did a TEDx Talk about it and built a website called smartphonediet.info to help others who could relate to my experience. But my euphoria was short-lived.

After a while, walking was not getting my heart rate into the target zone, so I started running. I hurt my back, pulled a calf muscle, and ultimately had to go back to walking as fast as I could without breaking into a run. I tried cycling and step climbers and Nordic tracks, but in the end, I could not burn enough calories in 1 hour per day to have an impact. Over the course of a year my 1,500-calorie-per-day nutrition routine stopped working and I started gaining weight.

Failure

By June of 2017 I had put back 45 lbs. of the 55 lbs. I had lost. This time I was truly helpless. Every medical professional I went to see told me the same thing. “You’re fighting gravity. Your body wants to be a certain weight, you’ve trained it to live on 1,500 calories per day, and if you want to lose weight, you’ll have to learn to live on 1,200 calories per day or less. And you’ll need to step up your exercise.” To make matters worse, the doctors I was seeing did not want me to try to exist on 1,200 calories per day because that is considered a starvation diet and is known to be unsustainable.

I was told over and over again that all I could do was what I was doing and just hope for the best.

If you want to really get me motivated, tell me a task is impossible. Which brings us to the past 120 days. On June 1, 2018, I weighed in at 238, but I had a new plan. My secret weapon: Apple Health.