There have been several meticulous weight watchers in history, but Santorio Santorio is probably the most interesting. Back in the 16th century, he dedicated his life to monitoring his body, weighing both everything he put into it… and everything that came out.
For a particular scientific exploration, he invented what he called a sanctorean scale – a seat placed next to a dining table, on a steel scale, which strictly controlled body weight.
By eating and drinking as much as the body had discharged (which he measured in urine, feces, and sweat, or what he called “insensible perspiration”), he claimed, this would allow people to maintain the same weight. Here’s the trick: once it’s determined that you’ve eaten too much, the chair drops you and you can no longer reach the food on the table. “As a consequence,” he explained at the time, “all food and drink would be out of reach, thus sanctioning the end of the meal.”
Although his idea was widely mocked at the time, Santorio was right: there is something deeply attractive about an individual, experimental and quantitative approach to our health.
Almost two centuries later, Benjamin Franklin read about Santorio and was inspired to write down everything he ate and make a list of what he ate. all its 13 virtues. He then marked them every time he committed an immoral act; monitoring and quantifying your life, minutiae at a time.
Coming back to the modern world, with the help of technology, there are people who have gone to great lengths to record their lives. Like a Reddit user who made a beautiful visualization of data about your baby’s sleep and wake times in the first months of his life. The image begins when the baby is born and spirals like a ribbon wrapped around a clock face. It is dark blue when your daughter is sleeping and yellow when she is awake. In the first few days of his life, he is an absolute disaster (sorry to tell you, new moms and dads-to-be), but then, little by little, he calms down and a pattern begins to emerge. A tiny human being, in sync with the rhythm of life, all told through one continuous line on a page.
Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6
Take your health tracking to the next level with Galaxy AI
If you want to monitor your health, an easy place to start is to pair Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip6 with Samsung Galaxy wearables. With the Samsung Health free app, users can track sleep patterns, heart rate, blood pressure, and calories. This information can be used to manage your well-being by informing your Energy score – a daily measurement of your energy and physical and mental readiness from Galaxy AI. Alternatively, tune in and out of relaxing mindfulness and relaxation meditation programs.
Of course, with the advent of wearable devices, it is easier than ever to monitor our bodies and our health. Technology has empowered us in the way we care for our well-being. AI-powered wearables connected to smartphone apps now allow us to track everything from sleep patterns and blood oxygen levels to heart rate and blood pressure.
There is something comforting about knowing the numbers, about taking objective measures of how we are doing. This, of course, can be a great form of motivation towards our goal, especially socially, of connecting with a community concerned with health documentation and ownership. I know I’m not the only one who is completely incapable of exercising without some kind of external accountability, and for many people technology really helps on those days when you can’t seem to get off the couch.
However, we must be careful not to put tracking numbers before well-being and how we feel. Many of the things we are told we should track daily, like eight glasses of water a day or 10,000 steps a day, have There is almost no scientific evidence to support them.. In particular, 10,000 steps is a completely arbitrary number, based on a Japanese pedometer from the 60s called the manpo-keiwhich means “10,000 step meter.” It was named so because the Japanese character for 10,000 looks like a person walking or running, which was later implemented in the marketing campaign.
When it comes to fitness, remember that numbers are always a placeholder for what we really want to know. Everyone is different and reacts differently to external forces. And while trackers allow people to understand what is “good” or “normal” within themselves, this data should only be used to inform about their health, it should not override the real human body.
