Ernesto Ramirez

June 2, 2014

Tracking diet and weight is nothing new and we’ve seen plenty of talks on the influence of carbohydrate intake on weight and metabolic values. But what about other pieces of daily life that could be influenced by what we eat? Adrienne Andrew Slaughter was testing out a new diet that included carbohydrate restriction. At the same time she was commuting to work on a bike. She started to notice feeling tired and slow during her commutes and wondered if her dietary changes had anything to do with it. Luckily, Adrienne was tracking her commutes and her diet and was able to run detailed data analysis to find out what happens when she goes carbless. You can watch her talk below, see her slides, and read her answers to our three prime questions.

Slides

You can also view the slides here [pdf].

We also asked Adrienne to answer the three prime questions:
What did you do?
I tracked two things: my bike commutes to work, and my adherence to a very low carb diet.

How did you do it?
I used RunKeeper to capture my rides, Strava to extract an uphill segment with no red lights, and Lift to track my adherence to a low carb diet.

What did you learn?
I learned that, especially for the first episode of eating very low carb, it took me longer to climb the hill on my way to work. When I increased my carb intake, I was able to climb the hill at my original speed. However, during the second episode of eating very low carb, I didn’t get as slow, and I returned to baseline fairly quickly– my body adapted to the change faster.