Being inaccurate certainly isn’t beneficial in your school exams, degree courses, driving test, spelling, report writing, calculating your finances and etc but it may well be beneficial when it comes to tracking your health and well-being.

A primary focus of the One Precious Life philosophy is focusing on relative change, that’s change individual to you in comparison to previous values that you have recorded. With this in mind being consistently wrong in your measures, to the same extent as previously, will likely be more beneficial than getting it correct some of the time. Let me give you a practical example.

Ben Dover wants to lose a few pounds so he decides to track calories. He has a fairly consistent routine when it comes to eating, with similar portion sizes including a range of carbohydrate sources, fats predominantly from vegetable oils and protein coming from animal meats. However because Mr Dover cooks his food from larger packets of rice and etc it becomes very hard to identify the exact amount he is cooking and he estimates the amount and puts it into his calorie tracker. He identifies that he can reduce his carbohydrate intake slightly to instigate weight loss through a negative energy balance (taking in less than he’s burning), he then uses the tracker to calculate his adjustment in sizes. Here’s the cool bit… Ben was way out on his calculations first time round, but it doesn’t matter, because he adjusts his portion size by roughly a fifth consistently meaning that he still has a numerical value to keep him on track, even though the figure is wrong! He stays on target and loses weight, voila.

This can be applied to almost anything, the key is not that you have your values spot on, but rather that what you do is consistent. That way you can monitor a change, regardless of the real extent of that change you know how large it is IN COMPARISON to everything you’ve done previously. This is the same way that make activity trackers effective beyond their capabilities, providing you don’t buy loads and interchange them all.

So there you have it, hopefully you can pull some good information out of another article consisting of my crazy ramblings.

Jack Barton (Researcher, Rescon Ltd)