How To Be Fit & Rich: A Proven System To Consistently & Constantly Grow Your Fitness & Your Money
I’ve had two overarching goals pretty much my whole life—to be fit & to be rich. These two goals have heavily shaped and influenced my entire life path. I spent about two decades trying to figure out how to achieve them while only experiencing a modicum of success in either area. Little did I know that if I had just understood a simple but fundamental concept & followed a simple system I would have achieved significant success with both of these goals much sooner.
These two goals are fairly common, no surprise there. Many people just like me spend their whole life trying to figure out one or both of these. Unfortunately, a vast majority of people will give up well before reaching either and spend the rest of their life “living in quiet desperation.“
Furthermore, I’m not the first (and I won’t be the last) to realize fitness & money won’t solve all your problems. Nor do I believe they are the ultimate goal in life. Yet, having one or both gives you immense power over your very own life. And with this power, you can do some pretty awesome things in this world & empower way more people than just yourself. And serving a cause or multiple causes higher than yourself is one of the noblest of human endeavors.
This article provides a simple system that anyone can follow and if it is truly followed it will only be a matter of time before your fitness and/or money goals are not only achieved but maintained & improved upon year after year. This system will work whether or not you have the right genes or make a big or small income. The system is simple, but executing it consistently will take practice. Everything worth having takes consistent investment over time. Now let’s dig into my personal fitness & money story.
As a teenager, I wasted my money trying to become fit with ridiculous fitness toys from “As Seen On TV” ads. I wasted even more money on supplements always seeking the elusive “magic pill” that would grant me the fitness I was seeking.
I wasted my time & energy going running in the morning only to have pizza for lunch and a pizza pocket for dinner.
Later in life, I would go on to work out 7-days a week for 2-3 hours a day trying all sorts of types of exercise and still not achieve the level of fitness I wanted. I did this for years. And I still didn’t have the body I dreamed of!
As a young adult, I wasted my hard-earned money on eating out & going out, expensive housing, expensive cars, tech gadgets, tons of clothes and pretty much buying anything and everything I wanted as soon as the urge popped into my mind. I was doing my best to look & feel rich. But behind the rich facade, there were the constant nagging thoughts about why I had little money in savings & investments despite earning what many would consider a great income. “Why am I not rich already?” I wondered to myself. This was usually just followed by the thought, “I guess I just have to earn more.”
Basically from the age of 13-32, my fitness & finances were a black hole of confusion I didn’t understand. I worked out more than most people I knew. I was earning more money than most of my friends. I ate healthier. My career path was very lucrative. I took all the right supplements. Did the right exercises. I thought I was doing everything right but I still didn’t have the body or the level of wealth that I deeply wanted.
So what finally changed?
It all began with tracking my food intake.
My Physical Fitness Journey:
In September of 2013, I returned to Stanford after an 8-year leave of absence. It was then that I started working with an online fitness coach and he had me begin to track my food. In the beginning, there were no goals other than logging what I ate into MyFitnessPal every day.
MyFitnessPal is a digital food diary that makes logging food incredibly easy with over 11 million foods in their database. You can literally scan barcodes or type-search whatever you are eating, select the serving size and boom! All your calories/macros are in the palm of your hand when using the smartphone app (what I use).
Tracking my food was eye-opening, to say the least. My calorie intake was all over the place. And my “cheat days” were ludicrous. I discovered I could easily consume 5,000-10,000 calories in a day—WTF!! For context, the daily recommended intake of calories for the average man is 2,500 calories (2,000 for women).
During this initial induction into food tracking, I loosely started tracking my weight but it was not consistent. Even with erratic weight tracking, just by logging what I ate every day I become more conscious of what & how much I was putting into my mouth. Just by paying more attention my eating improved and I was down 10 whole pounds just in the first month of tracking food!
The first big learning that came from tracking my food the first month was that it does not matter how healthfully you eat if you are eating more calories than your body needs. If you eat more than your body needs the excess calories get stored mostly as body fat. It is obvious when you think about it, but it’s a different level of understanding when you measure & track it.
Eventually, my online coach started setting daily calorie & macronutrient targets and I followed them. At the same time, that calorie/macro goals were set my online coach recommended I start tracking my body weight every day so we could see the effect of calorie/macro targets on my overall body composition.
Tracking food AND tracking body weight daily is when the real magic started.
By August 2014 I was down 15 pounds from my starting weight of 182 pounds. By September 2014, 1-year later from when I first started tracking food & body weight, I was 20 pounds lighter! And I was feeling and looking more fit than I ever had. Going from 182 to 162 was a massive change for me. My total body weight had changed by nearly 11%! This was very motivating.
Less than a month later (beginning of October 2014) I was down another 7 pounds weighing in around 155, a 27-pound difference in just a little over a year of tracking.
From November 2014 to mid-January 2015 I floated between 155-160. Then from January 25, 2015, until now (January 2020) I’ve floated from approximately 147-156.
Over 6 years of Body Weight tracking from 9/30/2013 - 12/8/2019.
For the record no one would have ever considered me overweight, even when I was 182 pounds. I just went from being fairly fit to being really fit. By really fit I mean a visible 6-pack, vascularity, and an all around shredded look.
I double downed on my fitness tracking by adding daily body fat tracking since the end of June 2015. For the most part I’ve stayed at or below 10% body fat year round for nearly 4.5 years.
For men, 10% body fat and under is when the abs and muscularity really begin to show so thats why I aim to stay at or well below 10%. Some may consider it a vain & pointless goal, but I say looking and feeling good and putting in the work to create that physical/mental/emotional state is just as worthy of a goal as any other as long as it isn’t the only thing you care about.
Women naturally carry more body fat than men so if you are female and reading this definitely don’t compare yourself to men’s body fat levels. For comparison & better understanding I’ve included charts for both men & women that outline the body fat ranges for each classification of body fat levels. There is a significance difference between the two.
Source for both men & women’s body fat % classification charts: FITNESSCITY
What I realized for myself is that I actually care more about my body fat percentage than my actual weight. This is because though body weight and body fat percentage are highly correlated you can put on more muscle mass, become heavier, yet have a lower body fat percentage and look even better than when you were at a lighter weight. This is true for both men & women.
And if you really want abs and muscularity your body fat percentage has to be dialed in. I’ve found that if I just focus on keeping my body fat where I want it my body weight follows suit.
Feeling fit, strong & happy!
Ultimately when it comes to my fitness I am going for a healthy balance of look, feel & performance. In short, I like to look good, feel good, feel strong & do all the physical things that bring me joy. It took over well over 15-years to figure it out but now that I know the metrics to track it’s been fairly easy & straightforward to maintain for the last six years.
My Financial Fitness Journey:
My financial fitness follows a similar story. In November of 2017 I began tracking my Expenses & Net Worth with Mint & Personal Capital. In the beginning I really just focused on watching my expenses, just like I did with watching my calories consumed. I didn’t take immediate action, instead I just witnessed where my money was going.
Fortunately, I had signed up for Mint years prior to this and it had saved most of my financial expense history since the time of initial signup. Though I had signed up years prior I didn’t actually ever look at my Mint account or use it any way. In November 2017 I finally did take a look under my financial hood and it was a mess (more on the extent of the mess here).
One the first areas I took a deep look at was auto expenses. Using Mint I was easily able to see that in a little over the last 2-years I had spent around $7,200 on car repair & maintenance for my Range Rover. This blew my mind. I thought to myself, “Over seven thousand dollars?! I could have bought a decent used car for that kind of money!”
Consciously quantifying this expense led me to selling my Range Rover and getting a Prius. I drive all over the San Francisco Bay Area for work so having a hybrid car that is ultra-reliable and gets amazing gas mileage was a powerful way to improve my weekly, monthly & yearly financial position.
Since getting my Prius in April of 2018 (1 year 8 months from the time of this writing) my repair & maintenance has been ~$799. This has included 3 oil changes and a new set of tires ($600+) which should last me at least 5-6 years if not more. I’m basically on pace for paying 1/10th of what I used to pay for automative repair & maintenance. Or in other words I’m 88.9% more financially efficient in just this one area of my personal finances! That’s a massive gain in financial performance and I’m not even factoring in gas & insurance which is significantly more optimized with my Optimus Prius.
In other areas of my financial life, I started noticing various subscription expenses that I wasn’t even using. For example I had Legal Zoom monthly fee that I hadn’t used in years! So I called them up and asked for a reimbursement and got well over $1000 back. I went on to cancel all subscriptions I wasn’t using regularly.
I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve talked to who have had a similar thing happen with discovering multiple unused subscriptions after they started tracking expenses.
Truth be told, it was discovering the concept of Financial Independence that led me to tracking expenses. This tracking then led me to understand where my money was going and I quickly realized my expenses were out of control in a number of areas. It was a similar experience to discovering that my coveted 5K-10K calorie “cheat day” was destroying all the good fitness work I was putting in the rest of the week.
In other words, it was my spending that was destroying all the good earning work I put in every month.
It all seems so obvious in retrospect, but most people don’t track their expenses and Americans on average save less than 5% of their income a month. Many have a negative saving rates, as in they spend more than they earn & carry significant amounts of debt. I too was one of these people for close to a decade. By building the habit of tracking my finances I broke the habit of spending that was derailing my wealth building.
In all areas of life, I repeated the process of analyzing my expenses and seeing where I could trim, cut back, improve or even completely remove. All of these small financial improvements in various life areas added up to a significant amount and completely transformed my financial trajectory.
Over two years later I still review my expenses in all areas every single month. Ultimately, it has become a process of ensuring that all my expenses truly reflect my values & my goals.
The tracking of expenses gives everyone the power to align spending with one’s goals & values. This is a very good thing. Living an intentional life includes intentional use of our financial resources.
The next level of financial tracking is Net Worth tracking. This is totally up your assets (savings, investments, home equity, etc.) minus your liabilities (credit card debt, school loans, mortgage, etc). Again, both Mint & Personal Capital can easily do this for you if you just link your accounts.
As a kid I always dreamed of becoming a millionaire but up until November 2017 I hadn’t ever even measured how close or far off I was. I seriously had no idea what my Net Worth was until age 35. I was completely oblivious. And growing something you aren’t even aware of is a recipe for poor results.
I’ve been using Personal Capital to watch my Net Worth grow and it’s been pretty amazing. I’ve nearly 7X’d my Net Worth in the 2-years since I started tracking it. Now that’s just fucking crazy growth!
YEEHAW!! The ever-growing Stash! AKA my Net Worth over 2-years (11/2017-12/2019). I’m not revealing actual numbers, but it’s fun to see the growth on a graph.
[P.S. The wild spikes are from making investments and waiting for the cash withdrawal to be reflected. It usually takes a couple business days so my net worth gets falsely inflated until the accounts settle.]
Another key part of my financial growth was regularly tracking another instrumental personal finance metric—my monthly Savings Rate.
Your Savings Rate is:
(Take Home Pay* - Expenses) / Take Home Pay
*Take home pay includes any pre-tax savings (i.e. 401K contributions).
For example if someone makes $5K after taxes are taken out each month, spends $2.5K on housing, food, car & all of life’s other expenses each month and saves the rest then their savings rate would be 50% [(5K-2.5K)/5K] for that month.
The reason tracking Savings Rate is so valuable is because it is an easy to understand rubric of approximately how much longer you need to work until all work becomes optional. This article by the luminary blogger Mr. Money Mustache breaks it down really well (it’s the article that transformed my financial life). In short, if you can save 50-75% of your take home pay you only have a mandatory 7-17 year working career. After that all additional work just adds to your ever-growing stash and gives you ever-increasing options.
I’ve been calculating & tracking my monthly Savings Rate since December of 2017. Over the last two years it has ranged from 48% up to as high as 91%. For the last two years I’ve maintained a Savings Rate over 80%.
For the record, I plan to keep working indefinitely as I believe humans are designed for perpetual progress in order to be happy. However, I always want to make sure that the work I do is “work I believe in and truly want to do” versus “work I have to do because I have bills to pay.” Fortunately, that is currently the case for me & has been the case for the last 6 years as a founding team member Oh My Green, a Stanford tech startup in the food & wellbeing industry.
The strategy to getting a really high savings rate is simple, but not necessarily easy. First you optimize your biggest three expenses—(1) housing (2) car/transportation & (3) food. Then you focus on earning as much as possible. As you earn more you continue to keep your housing, car/transportation & food expenses as low as possible.
This process will lead to an increasing Savings Rate over time. Unfortunately, most people increase their living expenses as they earn more. For most, a bigger paycheck usually means a bigger house, nicer car, more fancier eating out, more expensive vacations, etc. And this is why most people never get ahead. For most of my life I too suffered from this insidious human tendency known as Hedonic Adaptation. As I earned more I just spent more. This is often called lifestyle inflation or lifestyle creep. And this American tendency is why most people “have to work until 65 or later” doing work they don’t necessarily enjoy.
For the record, you can definitely optimize all your other expense areas too & that will also help, but if you just focus on the big three you don’t have to worry as much about frugalizing everything else in in your life.
Also for the record, if one of the big three are super important to you then cut back in areas that are not as important to you and make up the difference. It’s an equation you can consciously custom-tailor to fit the life you personally want to live and that is going to vary radically from person to person. For example, my partner values eating out so she eats out with friends. I work at tech food company and get great food as part of my career/calling so I don’t value paying money to eat out at expensive restaurants. I’d rather enjoy the benefits of my work & cook at home the rest of the time.
Back to tracking. To me, tracking one’s Savings Rate percentage is akin to tracking your Body Fat percentage, only they are the inverse of one another. The higher your Savings Rate the better and the lower your Body Fat percentage the better.
Your Net Worth is largely at the mercy of your investments & the markets so though it is a good habit to always keep your eye on continuously growing your Net Worth & ensuring your investments are as sound as can be, the reality is that sometimes the whole market goes south and your Net Worth gets hammered. This is out of your control. But if your investments are indeed sound it just becomes a matter of weathering the storm, aka holding onto your investments & not selling them when they are down. Selling when you are down locks in your losses versus waiting until the market recovers (which it always does).
On the other hand, your Savings Rate is for the most part completely in your control as it is a function of your earning & spending. You can always work to earn more & spend less in any market condition.
For me personally, tracking my Net Worth & Savings Rate has given me massive amounts of focus & drive to optimize & grow both metrics. Business management luminary Peter Drucker said,
“What gets measured gets managed.”
This is the fundamental concept I alluded to in the opening paragraph of this blog post and I couldn’t agree more. I’ve seen this with my fitness, my finances & other key areas of life that I’ve measured & tracked.
With easy to understand and easy to measure metrics it becomes obvious what you need to do each day in order to keep on track and get to where you want to go (or stay where you want to be).
Over the weeks & months of tracking you can easily identify which little habits and decisions are making a difference. You can also identify the things you do that detract from where you are trying to go. Tracking key metrics gives you a feedback loop & deep awareness.
With this awareness you can do more of what is helping spur you along to your goal and less of what is hindering you. When you work both sides of the equation you get serious traction and move even faster towards achieving your overarching goals.
Most fitness experts (the ones who have the bodies everyone dreams of) will tell you that 80-90% of their fitness is due to their diet. The other 10-20% is exercise (and to some degree the quality & amount of sleep you get). It doesn’t matter how much you exercise if your eating isn’t inline with your physical goals.
Personal Finance works the same way. The number one recommendation I hear from those who have reached Financial Independence & become millionaires & multimillionaires is to track your expenses.
It doesn’t matter how much you earn if you spend it all every month. You will literally never become rich if you don’t save & invest a portion of your earnings. The larger the percentage of your earning that you save & invest the faster you become rich. Or if you are already rich, the richer you become.
For both Fitness & Finances I like to think there are three levels of tracking ranging from beginner, to intermediate, and finally there is the advanced level. Here they are:
The 3 Levels of Fitness & Finance Tracking:
Level 1 (Beginner): Tracking Weight, Tracking Net Worth: this is the basic level. At this level you will loosely know whether or not you are getting more or less fit and more or less rich. However, you will not know at a detailed level what is actually causing you to gain or lose in your fitness & your finances.
Level 2 (Intermediate): Tracking Food Intake, Tracking Expenses: this is the intermediate level. At this level you will easily & quickly be able to see what is contributing to your gain or loss in your fitness & finances. With this feedback you can easily adjust to optimize gains in both your fitness & your finances.
Level 3 (Advanced): Tracking Body Fat Percentage, Tracking Savings Rate: this is the advanced level. Now you’re like a fine tuned Olympic athlete who is seeking to improve by percentage points. Physically, at this level, you are looking to maintain or increase muscle mass and reduce body fat resulting in a stronger, more efficient and more aesthetically appealing body. Financially, at this level, you are looking to not only decrease your spending but also to increase your earning (working both sides of the equation). This results in more and more money to save & invest each month. Each percentage point gained in the appropriate direction makes you that much fitter and that much richer. Percentage points compounded over months and years ends up being a radical difference in the long run.
All of these metrics build upon one another from Level 1 up to Level 3. They synergize when they are tracked together. At Level 3 you still want to track Level 1 & 2 metrics because they inform & influence one another as well as give you the whole picture and cover the whole feedback loop that will empower you to reach your goals in the most optimized manner.
What I mean by this is that your food intake has a direct influence on your body fat percentage and your expenses have a direct influence on your savings rate. Keeping an eye on your body weight lets you see at what weight you achieve your ideal aesthetic look when body fat-percentage and muscle mass are held constant. Measuring your Savings Rate ensures you don’t fall prey to lifestyle inflation and that you’re constantly working to increase your earning potential. Yet, even with a strong Savings Rate you still want to track Net Worth to ensure that your savings are being put to good use into investments that are growing with the ever-changing economy & markets. This is keeping your eye on the whole picture and watching the metrics that paint the picture.
If you’re just getting on the Fitness & Finances tracking you can start with Level 1. This is like pulling out Google Maps and figuring out just where the hell you are. Knowing where you are is step number one to getting where you want to go.
When you move to Level 2 it’s like you are actually starting to move with Google Maps. The GPS system shows you whether or not you are on track and it reroutes you when you get off track.
Level 3 is like you have the Google Maps GPS system optimized to avoid traffic and you traded in your car for a motorcycle so even if you do hit traffic you can weave through the mess and still arrive well ahead of time.
I do strongly encourage those just getting started to spend a few weeks or even a few months just tracking so you can start to get a better picture of where you are at and how what you are doing with your fitness & finances is influencing your general direction. This is like the warm-up to the real exercise which is to use tracking with a clear goal in mind.
For all three levels, a clear goal must be set in order for the tracking system to really get traction.
The goal can be broader, i.e. lose 10 pounds and grow annual income by $10K or it can be refined, i.e. maintain 10% or less body-fat month over month and save 50% of take-home pay month over month. The clearer your goal the more powerful your tracking becomes and the faster you will reach your goal.
If tracking both your fitness & finances seems like too much just start by tracking one. Choose whichever area needs the attention most. You can add in tracking for the second area once you get the hang of it with one of them. This is what I did. I started with fitness. Over 4 years I refined just my fitness tracking then realized the same could be done with my finances and began tracking in a whole new life-area.
How I track my fitness & finances (nuts & bolts):
FITNESS
I use a food scale at home and track everything I eat to the gram. MyFitnessPal makes it super easy to log. It sounds tedious but it’s like brushing my teeth at this point. I’m going 6 years strong with daily food tracking and don’t show any signs of stopping. When I eat out I just estimate to the best of my ability—when you are regularly weighing & measuring everything during home meals it gets pretty easy to make a good guestimate when eating out.
SPECIAL NOTE: Through tracking my food I learned that “I can eat anything I want, I just can’t eat everything I want all at the same time.” This is freedom through constraint.
If you want to know what I eat every day just add me as a friend on MyFitnessPal and you can view my Food Diary.
I weigh myself & measure my body fat every morning after using the bathroom. I use a Withings Body Cardio Scale which measures & tracks both. It wirelessly syncs with MyFitnessPal too so my food, bodyweight & body fat percentage are all recorded in the same place.
FINANCES
All my accounts (checking, savings, investments, credit cards, etc) are synced with Mint & Personal Capital.
I review my Net Worth daily/weekly using Personal Capital. I also quickly review my expenses to make sure there isn’t anything on there that shouldn’t be and to keep my spending in check.
At the end of the month (or usually the first few days of the following month) I review all my expenses to make sure they are appropriately categorized.
I then quickly look over my spending categories, analyze any that are significantly higher or lower than the previous month and make a mental note of any that I can potentially further optimize in the next month.
I then calculate my Savings Rate and update a running Savings Rate monthly log in a digital note.
The Mindset of Tracking Fitness & Finances
All of this tracking may seem overwhelming, tedious, boring or too hard but it really isn’t once you take the time to build the habit and the system. And thanks to the Gods of Technology it really is quite simple. For me, it really is like brushing my teeth. It is just something I do every day/week/month.
Tracking literally creates Mindfulness. Especially when it comes to fitness & personal finance. Most people are mindless consumers of both food & things. They eat & buy whatever whenever they get the urge which is basically all the time thanks to the non-stop availability of food to eat, things to buy & social/traditional media programming that encourages everyone to consume constantly. Tracking gives us clarity. Tracking keeps us aligned with our values & goals despite the noise. Ultimately, tracking gives us back our power over our very own lives.
Tracking empowers us to be the Captain of our ship, always heading to a destination of our choosing despite getting off track much of the time. If you were to watch a ship or an airplane on its way to a pre-determined destination you would quickly learn that it is a never-ending process of course correcting. In fact, the vessel is usually off course most of the time, but by constantly measuring the correct metrics and course-correcting it ultimately arrives at its destination. This is the same process we undergo as humans striving towards a destination (goal) guided by an accurate GPS (metrics).
What’s even more awesome is that the tracking actually becomes something fun & something you look forward to. I know you may think I’m crazy for saying this but I’ve talked with tons of people who track their fitness or their finances (or both) and they freely admit it brings them a lot of joy. Personally, I get psyched every month when calculating my Savings Rate (I’m always trying to beat the prior month), I jump for joy every time I hit a new low on my body fat percentage and I’m seriously motivated every week to grow my Net Worth just by looking at the ever-growing graph of it.
One last note on the mindset around tracking. I’ve come to realize over the years that all the tracking is just data or feedback that empowers me to adjust course. It is NOT criticism letting me know that I am failing. When I save less money it doesn’t mean I failed that month. It’s just data that is trying to coach me to do better next month. Same with my body fat. If it increases from one day to the next I review what I ate, how I exercised, how I slept, and my overall health habits. I take the data & use it to guide me where I need to go. Don’t be a victim of the data, use it to be a victor with your fitness & your finances. Essentially you must take on a Growth Mindset in order to use the data to empower you, knowing that if you listen to the coaching it is constantly providing and put it into ACTION you will improve month over month.
The truth is that tracking works in just about every area of life. For anything that you want to radically improve you just need to identify the key metric(s) and start tracking. The little decisions and actions that influence this metric will be revealed through the tracking process. Then by consciously & proactively making the decisions and taking the actions each day that take you in the direction you want to go the magic of compounding begins to take effect. In the beginning, it always seems like almost nothing is happening. Then one day you look back, maybe a few months or even a year later, and think “Wow! Look how far I’ve come!” You will likely be amazed and you will surely feel damn good about this growth & progress. The experience of “progress” is one thing that always brings deep satisfaction & more lasting happiness.
Lastly, I realize my way of tracking fitness & finances may not be for everyone, but if you don’t at least try it for a few months you will never even get the opportunity to see whether it’s the thing you’ve been missing to create the success you’ve been longing for. Also, there are countless ways to track. My partners likes to track her finances in a paper binder. It makes it more physcial & tangible for her and most importantly—that’s what works for her. If my system doesn’t work for you, reshape it so it does.
The system you have in place, whether consciously designed or not, is giving you your current results. If you are unhappy with your current results you must redesign your system. Ultimately, the key is to develop a system that consistently & constantly brings you the results you want.
In closing, here are three major points to remember:
The mind is such a powerful machine when you give it a goal and track your progress. However, the machine is only as good as the user so take the time & conscious effort to program your mind machine to take you where you really want to go. Define the destination & track the key metrics that will get you there.
Tracking creates Mindfulness & it can be a ton of fun if you approach it with the right attitude & a Growth Mindset. Make the data your coach in a game you are striving to win every day, week, month, & year.
Tracking shapes our daily/weekly/monthly habits. Over the years these habits undergo the magic of the compounding effect. Fitness & Financial Tracking is not a get rich fast or get fit fast program. It is a get rich & get fit for an entire lifetime program.
I’m always looking for ways to improve my life so please leave a comment or message me on one of my socials if you have additional ideas, thoughts, tools, and/or other awesome life areas you track.
Your Life Alchemist,
Justin David Carl
P.S. I wish I had understood this concept around fitness & finance tracking when I was in my early 20s versus discovering it in my 30s. I’d literally be a decade or more ahead of where I am now and the magic of compounding would have been at work for much longer. However, rather than lament about what could have been please share this with someone just getting started out on their fitness and/or financial journey. It can literally save them years or decades of wasted effort & massive frustration of “trying to figure it out” on their own. We’re all in this together so let’s empower one another!
Some of the other areas of life I track:
Sleep
Steps
Workouts (including strength)
Sales (in my career at Oh My Green)
Credit Score
Writing
Related articles, books & resources:
How To Be An Ultra Fit Entrepreneur - a more detailed article on my approach to fitness.
Reshaping My Money Story - a recap of my first year on the path to Financial Independence including key insights & take-aways.
The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy - a short but powerful read about how habits & routines compound over time to make you extra-ordinary.
The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson - another awesome book about the compounding effect of all the little decisions and actions we take every day.
Atomic Habits by James Clear - the best book I’ve read on habits.
Financial Freedom by Grant Sabatier - a comprehensive book on how to reach Financial Independence.
Quit Like a Millionaire by Kristy Shen & Bryce Leung - another great book & fun read on how to reach Financial Independence.
Personal Capital - I track all my expenses, income, investments & net worth with this.
Mint - I double track my expenses with Mint (yes, I’m a tracking nerd). It also tracks my credit score (updates every 7-days).
MyFitnessPal - I track my calories/macros, body weight & body fat percentage with this app. There are other apps you can use so if you don’t like this one find one you do like. I hear Avatar Nutrition is really good, but I’ve yet to test it out. The key is finding the tools that empower a system that brings you the results you want.
Food Scale - I use this to weigh my food. I like the slim profile as it makes it easy to travel with. I also like the fact that the screen lights up so it’s easy to read in low light.
Withings Body Cardio Scale - I use this body scale to measure my weight and body fat percentage every single day. This app automatically & wirelessly syncs with MyFitnessPal.
Strong - I use this app to track all my weightlifting workouts—every set & every rep.
Garmin Watch & HRM - I have a Garmin Fenix 5X & Garmin HRM-Tri Heat Rate Monitor that I use to track all my workouts, correlating heart rate & calories burned. I do this with my weightlifting, running, rollerblading, hiking, cycling, rock climbing & more. The watch & related app also track my sleep & steps.
FitBit Blaze - I think the sleep tracking is better on the FitBit and I like to double track my sleep & steps and compare the data (did I mention I’m a tracking turbo nerd?). For the record, I definitely do not think people need to wear more than one fitness watch. I’m just a turbo tracking nerd & I think sleep tracking is better on the FitBit while the Garmin is way more durable (i.e. it can handle obstacle course racing) & using a chest strap HRM is way more accurate than a wrist HRM.
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Title Photo Credit: @isaacmsmith
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