ANDRZEJ KRAUZELarry Smarr’s addiction to self-tracking came after he moved from Illinois to San Diego in 2000. He surveyed the citizens of his new town—considered one of the fittest in the U.S.—and “I realized I didn’t look like them,” he says. In other words, the computer science professor at the University of California, San Diego, had put on a few pounds. “I was standing on the scale every day, and I had one number, my weight, that defined me,” says Smarr.
In an effort to lose weight, Smarr started adding more numbers: how much he exercised, what and when he ate, and his heart rate throughout the day. As his waistline shrank, his curiosity grew. “I wanted to figure out if I could quantitatively measure how I’m doing,” he says. First, he sought to track the ratio of omega-3 fatty acids to omega-6 fatty acids in his blood. “Then I began to realize, gee, there are other things I could measure in my body.” By the mid-2000s he was logging stats on 150 different constituents of his blood.
Perhaps on the extreme end of the scale (Smarr says he’s spent tens of thousands of dollars quantifying himself), the computer scientist is part of a navel-gazing community ...
