How to Live by the Numbers: Health

Screen print: Kate Gibb; Photograph: Michael Elins The Frequent Walker Program

Unless popcorn shrimp is on offer, many Americans are loath to walk any more than necessary. That chronic sloth is a drag for employers, whose health care costs can swell in tandem with their workers' waistlines. Now Virgin impresario Richard Branson thinks he can save businesses a bundle with a program that turns personal fitness into a game, complete with reams of stats to obsess over. When companies sign up with Virgin HealthMiles, their employees rack up rewards for staying active: The more you walk, the closer you get to earning HealthCash, which can be redeemed for real cash or gift cards from Amazon.com, Target, and (curiously) Omaha Steaks.

Participants are issued pedometers and challenged to take 7,000 steps a day. That's about 3.5 miles—40 percent more than the average deskbound adult's daily distance. Hitting that goal in a day garners 20 HealthMiles, the program's equivalent of frequent flier points. Bonuses are available for simply logging in to the HealthMiles Web site (10 miles), taking a no-smoking pledge (500 miles), or updating your blood pressure, weight, and body fat at a HealthMiles kiosk (200 miles).

I gave it a go and found that once my routine perambulation was assigned a numerical value—and valuable gifts were on the line—I began dedicating inordinate effort to meet that 7,000-step target. At first, I was aghast to learn that despite my 25-minute trudge to the office, I averaged only 6,600 steps per day. The problem? I'm tall, and my legs are longer than average. So I shortened my stride.

Alas, I'm still nowhere near reaching HealthMiles' vaunted Level Five, which pays $500 in HealthCash. Employers that offer the program pick up that tab, but it could be a worthwhile investment: Virgin CEO Christopher Boyce claims that corporate clients can cut $2,500 off the annual cost of health care provided to each participant. Imagine how much more they'll save if Virgin ever develops a pedometer capable of stopping people from walking into a Dunkin' Donuts.
—Brendan I. Koerner

5 Health Tools

Fitbit
Record the steps you take each day, the calories you burn, and how much you sleep at night with this little device. Then auto-upload all that data wirelessly to the Web for analysis.
$99, fitbit.com

iBP
Track your blood pressure and pulse rate with this iPhone and iPod touch app. You can even email cumulative, long-term data to your doc for review.
$1, iiwiisoftware.com

CardioChek PA
This portable cholesterol and triglyceride counter gives you instant feedback and stores your last 30 blood tests to assess plaque-prevention efforts over time.
$680, cardiochek.com

QuitKey
QuitKey uses a two-stage program to help you stop smoking. First it tracks how much you smoke, then it builds a plan to gradually reduce your daily lung-punches all the way to zero.
$60, quitkey.com

Ovulation Calendar Pro
Not only does this iPhone app monitor menstrual cycles and symptoms, it also charts basal temperature to show upticks that indicate ovulation.
$5, ovucalendar.com

Experimental Man

Tim Lundeen wanted to know whether taking omega-3 supplements would improve his mental abilities, as UC Berkeley psychology professor Seth Roberts suggested. So the software developer devised a quick test of cognitive alacrity: Each day, he'd solve a random set of 100 simple arithmetic problems and track how long it took. As he increased his omega-3 dosage, his time improved, suggesting that the supplements were working. Of course, such self-administered experiments are a far cry from the large, randomized, double-blind studies accepted by science. But Lundeen's effort indicates how easily we can explore new ideas—and maybe even make some self-discoveries in the process.
—Gary Wolf

The Power of Self-Deception

You've just arrived home after a long workday. Should you pop open a beer or go for a jog? The beer is what you want now, but in the morning you'll wish you'd laced up those kicks and hit the pavement. Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling describes this essential conflict between our immediate and long-term desires as "egonomics" (no relation to the pop-biz book of the same title). To tilt decisionmaking in favor of our future selves, he proposes the idea of precommitment. Think of Cortès torching his ships at Veracruz so his men couldn't return to the comforts of Cuba. Thankfully, you needn't resort to arson: Simply skip the beer or cholesterol-laden foods at the grocery, sign up and pay in advance for a race, or buy pants a size down to force yourself to shed a few pounds.
—Mathew Honan

DATA POINTCaloric Intake

What are the most motivational numbers of all? $1, $5, $10, $20. A recent University of Pennsylvania study found that smokers who were offered $750 to quit were nearly three times more likely to succeed as those who weren't.

» Success Rate
Paid smokers...14.7%
Unpaid smokers...5%

Random Play Beats Outs Repetitious Drills

"Traditionally, the approach to practice for athletes has been very behavioral: You take one skill and do it over and over again until you master it," says Joan Vickers, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Calgary for 25 years. But her research shows that the best way to practice may be just to play, albeit in a very specific way.

In the early '80s, Vickers started using a corneal-reflection eye tracker to correlate attention and athletic performance. "There's a point in time in any sport where you have to initiate the crucial kinematic movement," she says. "What we call the ‘quiet eye' is the information you see just before you make that movement."

For an expert in almost any sport, "the quiet eye duration is longer, because the person gets to it early. The term is ‘predictive control': If you're very skilled at something you can predict what you need to do."

To help athletes improve their quiet eye and understand how it translates to athletic performance, Vickers devised a system of practice called decision training. "With the block-style behavioral learning approach, people are very successful in the short term, but if you come back to them a month after basic skill acquisition, their performance went down," she said. "We understand now that's because you turn your head off and all neural learning stops — only in challenging situations do people grow mentally."

Instead of, say, endlessly shooting three-pointers from the top of the key, DT emphasizes random and variable practice to develop a longer quiet eye. "You plunge them into the context; what they experience is the real context they have to deal with. Random practice is something easy, something hard, and no way to predict what's coming at you. Variability means instead of simple, basic skills, you put people in complex tactical situations where they have to learn the skill and the tactics at the same time."
—Joe Lindsey

Living by Numbers The Nike+ Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics How to Live by the Numbers: Exercise How to Live by the Numbers: Nutrition Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, From Sleep to Mood to Pain, 24/7/365.