Health auditing: a non-obsessive way to track your health

In this month’s newsletter, I briefly touched on a concept I call “health auditing.” I wanted to expand on it here because I think it offers a useful middle ground in our increasingly data-saturated health culture.

Sleep tracking, fitness tracking, calorie counting, and even advanced blood testing have become mainstream over the last few years, and already we’re starting to see the debate pick up as to how helpful (or harmful) these approaches truly are. While there are obvious benefits to tracking your metrics, there can also be downsides. This data can be time-consuming to collect and overwhelming, or even anxiety-provoking, to review. 

A lot of it comes down to the individual. Some truly enjoy collecting and analyzing this data, and can easily “shake off” any less-than-stellar metrics without getting down on themselves. Others find that their sleep tracker telling them they had a poor night of sleep is enough to ruin an entire day. Most of us are probably somewhere in the middle. Health auditing is an approach that I’ve found works well for me, as a middle ground between collecting every piece of data imaginable and avoiding metric tracking entirely.

Essentially, instead of continuous tracking 24/7/365, I measure and review metrics only at specific intervals. For example, I’m not religiously tracking my step count every day. Instead, I look at the average at the end of each month and attempt to make adjustments moving forward as necessary. Similarly, I don’t track calories and macronutrients regularly, but I do an “audit” typically once every 6 months. At the 6 month interval, I’ll track my diet for 5-7 days to make sure I’m roughly on track. The key here, of course, is to make sure that you stay true to your normal diet, and avoid eating abnormally healthy for a week just because you know you’re tracking during that window.

This approach works great for reducing time spent on data collection, and it also helps minimize stress from wearable devices where data collection is easy but the outputs can be overwhelming. You can play around with the intervals to see what works best for you. While for me, reviewing step counts is monthly and analyzing dietary patterns is every 6 months, your intervals may look different. Regardless, hopefully this gives you an idea of how you can take advantage of all the tools we have available to keep track of our health, without letting the tracking itself become unhealthy.

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