Sure, I would love to but I'll warn you that this sounds a little fucked up (because it is). I was writing code and was two days from launching a startup when my heart went to hell. I called our local Healthline and was told to call 911 because "you are having a heart attack" but I'm a moron so decided to drive myself to the hospital.

(I want to start with that story because I got myself into that mess by being a moron and figure that it's important you don't think this came from a place of intellect - it was 99% fear, trauma and trying to overcome the stupid defaults that got me into that mess in the first place.)

The first day that I got out of the hospital, I had to move back in with my Mom. I decided to go out for a walk and was in such a bad place that two little old ladies (one of whom had a walker) actually smoked me on the path back to my Mom's area. I was remarkably close to killing myself after that experience and in all truth, if it wasn't for my daughter (she was 18 months old at the time), I would not be here to write this. My GP referred me to a psychiatrist.

My psychiatrist is an amazing man and an incredible athlete. He suggested two tools that could help me with my cardio recovery but that have also been extraordinarily useful for my mental health. He recommended a Masimo fingertip oximeter and a training band by Polar.

The Polar training band is/was amazing. My first Polar was an H7 with an XXL band. Now I use an H10 with a small band. I'm not sure that I would choose the Polar again if I was starting out now - at the time, my psychiatrist suggested it because I could find a band that would fit in between my massive gut and the band of fat around my chest that used to lead coworkers to tease me about my bra size (I was assigned male at birth and continue to identify as male so that was not complimentary. It was funny at the time but quite sad to think about now.)

Program wise is where this story starts to get a little bit fucked up. Remember the first paragraph where I told you that I was writing code when my heart went to hell? Well, that really fucked me up and I quite literally could not write code or even sit in front of a computer. Computers have been my biggest love and practically my sole hobby since I was a 7 year old with a bad stutter. Suddenly, that was replaced with the most unbelievable fear whenever I would open up a text editor or even sit down at a keyboard.

Consequently, at first I started using mobile apps and ran everything through my iPhone. But as I started to recover and as my psych meds, therapy and other psychiatric help started to kick in a little more, my brain started to come back.

I have a marketing degree and really like data so as my brain started to come back, I started noticing correlations between cardiac metrics and purchasing activity.

That was strange. In a sense, my capitalism came back and I saw an opportunity. But, at the same time, I was a patient and doing cardiac rehab/support with ten older adults from my Mom's community. This sounds weird to anyone with a healthy heart but I'm a firm believer that whoever coined the term 'a broken heart' had had a cardiac intervention. It feels exactly the same and I had this group of older adults who cared enough about me to check in on me, come by and make me go for walks or even just sit and watch baseball with me. Consequently, I was never able to turn that opportunity into a business, but it gave me an idea about some code to write.

So, I started writing my own fitness tracker. At some point I might release it because it's been damned good for me. The first version is unbelievably sad and I have one hell of a lot of trouble reading that code over now. It was somewhere between a suicide note and a eulogy for my former self but that minimizes how brutally sad some of my variable and method names were. My favourite example is fatFuck.name = Greg.

That project turned into rehab and through the years I have kept adding to it. At first, it was purely about rehabbing my brain so I could write code again and maybe graduate to a point where I could comfortably refer to myself as user.name and heck, maybe even remove the word 'dead' from all my method names. But as it has grown, it has turned into a really good tool for teaching myself how to think in terms of healthy defaults.

Here is where stuff gets really fucked up sounding so if you've made it this far, good for you! I don't know if the app I wrote has actually helped me or if I hacked myself. I am deeply obsessive, to the point that when my psychiatrist did my OCD screening, I went home and rewrote my resume because the screening materials described my talents better than anything else I had ever written. When I build anything, I test it obsessively. In this case, to test it, I had to live it and 3.5 years later, I have a six pack, no love handles, two marathons down and an ultra in my imminent future.

Tracking nutrition against performance metrics yielded the most powerful results of all. At first, I started by writing down what I ate and then tracking my macros. I learned that what I thought was 2000 calories was actually closer to 4000 calories. As I started paying more attention to macros like protein and carbohydrates, I found a great feedback loop where eating healthier foods resulted in improved athletic performance. As my athleticism increased, I was able to work harder and then started tracking my moods against that data. That created another feedback loop where the better I ate, the harder I could exercise and the better I would feel.

At this point, 3.5 years later, I actually have healthy defaults. It sounds insane, but I genuinely have healthy defaults. The way I eat, the foods I eat and even the textures I enjoy have completely shifted around.

The only downside at this point is that I'm rather skeptical of most of the wearable industry. I've seen way too many metrics that make my capitalism tingle in funny ways. I know that I could enhance tracking with other tools but at this point, I'm pretty obsessed with reading their privacy policies and speaking as a patient instead of an entrepreneur, I don't think the marketing industry needs (or deserves) this type of data.

I feel like I've missed a lot. At some point, I'll put everything together into written form and do a better job of this reply. Sorry if this was disjointed!!