Activity Spotlight

How to incrementally refactor your health

[cw - food, diet, exercise] For much of my adult life, I've struggled to maintain a healthy weight. Like many others, I tried and failed over and over again to make the changes required to improve my health. On the surface, it should be easy, right? Burn more calories than you consume, and you'll lose weight. That's 100% true, but it's also like telling someone who can't dunk a basketball to "jump higher". How do you actually get there from the place you are today? Getting there requires reprogramming your habits - the source code of your life. But like any major refactor, your best bet is to move slowly and incrementally, rather than launching a huge rewrite that may never ship. In this presentation, I'll employ strained programming metaphors and eye-roll-inducing dad jokes to describe how I refactored my own habits around diet and exercise. While I will share specific tactics that worked for me, I'll focus on the high-level strategy more than the tactics. The tactics that worked for my life will likely not work exactly the same way for you. But I'm optimistic that the iterative approach I took will work pretty universally, because you'll always be adapting to the realities of your own life, situation, and preferences. As developers, when we solve an annoying problem that felt much harder than it needed to be, we'll often codify our solution in a blog post or an open source library. This session is my attempt to do that, so that maybe you can succeed more quickly at bringing your health under control than I did.