A Powerfully Lazy Man's Way to Better Health
194 Pounds at Five Foot Four
I’ve gotten serious about my health every year since I was about 21 years old, but I never really got serious about it until 2019. Before then I would buy books about being in shape and how to be healthy and what to eat, and I would try to do things like a macrobiotic diet or we would try to grow our own food. At one point we even borrowed a sun oven and we were making baked things on the back porch. None of that stuck.
By 2018 I had ballooned out to a whopping 194 pounds, which on a lot of men is not a ton of weight, but when you’re five foot four inches, it’s a lot. I’d dealt with this before when I’d gotten up to 160 pounds. At that time, we’d lived in an area where the sidewalks were plentiful, and all I needed to do was go outside and walk. I did, and I walked every day, and I dropped all the weight. That would probably have been around 2007 or 2008. Then, after a couple of years, I started picking it all back up. By the time my son was born in 2012 I was back up to 150, and by 2018 I’d hit 194.
I don’t want to look like I’m coming apart at the seams, or my face is about to come out of the skin. I’ve already got this double chin, which is a gift I inherited, and fat just erases that completely. With my particular facial shape you end up with a head going right into some shoulders.
Fifteen Minutes
In 2018 we lived in Morrisville, North Carolina, and there was no way for me to walk without having to drive a car, and I’m powerfully lazy for that. When we moved to Cary in 2019 there were sidewalks. All I had to do was step out my door and start walking.
By then I was in my late 40s and I’d built up enough awareness of habits and how they’re formed to know that if I decided to start out walking 25 miles a day I wouldn’t last very long. So I started by walking about 15 minutes. I didn’t care if I wanted to walk further than that. That was it, 15 minutes. It wasn’t really a time thing, it was more of a location thing. I would have a location in mind, I’d walk there, turn around, and walk home. After I got used to doing that, and after the urge to go further hit me pretty strong one morning, I modified my destination to be a little bit further, and I did that for a while.
It reminded me of the time I took cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. You do something similar if you can’t get enough sleep at night. The solution is counterintuitive. You figure out how long you actually sleep, you set your bedtime to match only that amount, and then you add back 15 minutes every week or two until you’ve built up to a full night. You might have to go back a step, readjust, but you’ll finally end up in a spot where you’ve got as many hours as you want if you’re willing to go through the process. The walking was a similar idea. If I just thought I was going to be able to walk five miles a day, well, maybe, but was I realistically going to continue doing that? Probably not. But if I made a smaller habit, then that would be realistic. And it did become realistic, and I carried it out.
By 2020 I was up to about five miles a day every morning. I’d leave every morning around 5:30 and go out and walk. The way I’d keep it fresh would be to switch the directions, because the hills were in opposite directions, and it called for a different load. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in the early stages of understanding how to train well.
I was wearing cotton T-shirts at the time. Cary, North Carolina, which is a suburb of Raleigh, gets mighty hot in the summer, and I thought I would outsmart it by going before daylight. I was pretty overweight, so I just figured when I got home and I was a complete sponge it was just my weight draining off, and I never thought that was anything I needed to worry about. At some point I was reading an article online that talked about polyester shirts and breathable clothes when you’re out walking, and how if you really wanted to suffer in high humidity environments then maybe you ought to get some cotton. I bought some of these polyester shirts, and I have not looked back from them. I wear them even in winter, because you do sweat in winter and, depending on how well you planned your layering, you can sweat even more.
During this time, a friend of mine was working out with a Navy SEAL coach and taking guitar lessons from me online. We ended up trading his fitness knowledge for the guitar lessons. He told me I needed to go faster. That the same walk day after day wouldn’t keep improving me because I would adapt. He said I needed to focus on going faster. I’m a big data person so this was actionable advice that I could extract with tools.
I had an Apple Watch, so I started using it. I also liked the fact that I could improve my HRV by walking, and that led to an interest in a lower resting heart rate. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. Lower resting heart rate led to optimal heart rates for walking. My friend Damian Richardson, a functional doctor in Creede, Colorado, told me about heart rate zones and formulas. At that point I started exercising with intention. Hold my heart rate steady at specific rates to produce specific outcomes, like a lower resting heart rate and higher VO2 max. The walking hadn’t changed, but what I was paying attention to had changed completely.
Because Science Says So
By then I was tracking my heart rate with my Apple Watch, and I’d started studying a little bit more about heart rate, and I found out about something called heart rate variability. Being a data person, I like nice sounding numbers. I like numbers that have research behind them to tell you things. I like to learn what they mean, and mostly I like to see what my numbers are and then figure out how to make them better.
Heart rate variability was a very interesting number to me, because it was said to be very important but I had no idea what it meant, and in many ways I still have no idea what it means, and I don’t think many people do. Your heart’s not going at 70 beats a minute. It’s going at 72 and then 73 and then 68, until it averages at 70. It’s that exact variability that gets measured. I’ve not heard many people get beyond that explanation and into why this variability matters. Why is an 82 millisecond heart rate variability superior to a 15 millisecond one? I can’t answer that question, other than to quote the science I do know: it is highly personalized and 82ms would be very high, on average scales, for most people. I noticed a lot of things about heart rate variability because I decided to start measuring mine on a daily basis. I started out with an app called Elite HRV. Used it for years. Every morning I would take my heart rate variability, and every morning I would use that score to help me determine what to do for the day.
The interesting thing about that score is that the score itself had a lot of impact on my subjective feeling. If the score told me my heart rate variability was sky high, I tended to have a good day. If my heart rate variability was super low, the day usually felt harder. I would also play a game of chess to see if my mental game was on, a habit I still have, and even that seemed to track with the score.
Gratitude and Fear
What I was not taking into account was the emotional state that goes into these readings. It’s really hard to take an objective heart rate variability reading when you’re conscious. Imagine you’ve just woken up and you want to take the reading, and then you remember that yesterday you were laid off from your job, and today you have to go in and face everyone, get your things, and then start a new job search. Meanwhile your bills are all stacking up. When you first wake up in the morning that might be the first thing you think about, and if it is, and if you’re anything like me, then you will get a low heart rate variability score. Is that a reliable metric of how well you recovered? Not in my opinion.
Take the opposite. I’ve woken up many mornings and had thoughts, particularly on peaceful mornings, where I would imagine my children doing this or that, or recall some goodness somebody did for me, and I could literally feel the coherence going up. It’s that smooth, ordered heart rhythm you sometimes feel when you’re in a grateful or peaceful state. It feels really good, and it’s really obvious when it’s happening. When you take your heart rate variability reading at a moment like that, I’ve had readings where my RMSSD was 175 before, which is almost unrealistically huge. I’ve had total power over 13,000 before, and a lot of that suggested a strongly relaxed state. Those are numbers that, on paper, I should not be registering. And while I trust that they were transient and real, I do doubt that they represent anything meaningful about my condition at any time.
Essentially, what I realized was I couldn’t believe those spot-checked numbers. If I wanted to know how I’m actually doing, then taking a heart rate variability reading while I was conscious was always going to introduce an emotional variable that I had nearly no control over. My emotions are what they are. I learned a long time ago that control over my emotional state is a tool I don’t have.
The Lights Completely On
At first I just laid the phone beside me with the app already open at night, and I had the Polar H10 strap around my chest. I would leave it unlatched because I knew that latching it would complete the circuit, which drains the battery. When I would first wake up in the morning I would quickly snap the sensor into place, open the phone app, and start the five minute reading, and really try to go back to sleep during the reading. I’m one of these people that wakes up with the lights completely on. Most mornings going back to sleep was not going to happen. A heart rate spike almost always accompanies my awakening, along with my body getting really warm really fast, and so I just get up. Gratitude and fear are both powerful, and they’re both coming at me at different times at different strengths but it was too immediate for the test to eliminate the emotional state for most days.
Not satisfied with that strategy, after a few months I started trying to solve the problem with a script, something that would start the reading as the watch knew I was about to wake up, because the watch seemed to know that I was going to wake up a couple minutes before I did. So I thought, well, if I can just get the watch to trigger the reading right then, it would mean I have to wear the strap and sacrifice the battery power, but I thought that would be a decent trade. The problem was my phone has corporate software on it, and you can’t keep the screen unlocked all night. A connection to the Bluetooth monitor cannot be made without the screen being unlocked. The app won’t run. So that plan wouldn’t work.
That’s My Own Data
I happen to be a software developer, and with the advent of AI coding assistants you can make powerful tools if you’re careful and plan well. The way I see it, only a lazy person would build an entire app just to avoid waking up two minutes early. So I did. I used AI to help and researched a lot about how heart rate variability works, how to measure it, how to capture it, how to connect Bluetooth sources. I found that the Polar H10 is a really incredible device. You can start a heart rate variability reading on the Polar H10 and have it capture internally high-quality RR interval data and keep those until the next morning. It’ll record up to 30 hours of them. On top of that, they offer an API that allows for streaming, so you can stream the RR data to your phone. When I realized both of these, I realized that I could build a dual architecture to capture internally while streaming, and then at the end of the night merge the two data sets back together and repair anything that might have been mangled.
But what was I going to do with a whole night’s worth of data? Your heart rate variability and your resting heart rate and all these things, they vary wildly if you have a dream or anything else. All of the other apps and wearables that I had, and I’ve owned a lot, I’ve owned every one that has a big name behind it, they’re all a black box. They don’t tell you when they collect your score, they don’t tell you how they collect your score, they don’t tell you what the criteria are, and you have no access to the RR data, so you have no way to analyze it for yourself. I don’t like any of those things. I don’t like models where you’re locked in because your own data is used against you. I don’t like subscription models, and I don’t like that I can’t do what I want. That’s my own data.
Organized Windows
I started researching some more, and I found out there’s a number called DFA Alpha One. I had no idea what the number was, but it seemed pretty important, and the AI seemed very excited about it. The research seemed solid and well documented. It also seemed very serendipitous that I just happened to be capturing it. I found out through more research that DFA Alpha One measures how stable and self-organized your heart rhythm patterns are over time, and there’s research that suggests it’s a promising way to select a window in which to measure your heart rate variability. So there was a problem solved. I could find these organized windows of my heart activity.
But I needed to know when to do that. I researched some more and found out that a good time to do that is bounded by your sleep. You want to do it between 30% and 70% of your sleep time. So I bounded the algorithm to only search within 30 to 70% of the time of sleep for organized areas, and when it collects the organized areas, it finds the one that has the highest RMSSD (that’s the standard metric for measuring short-term heart rate variability), and that becomes my score.
This takes conscious emotion largely out of the equation. I end up getting a seven minute heart rate variability reading without the emotional content or emotional baggage, and I trust this reading a whole lot more than the other readings I’ve done.
I’ve used the app for around six months now. It started as a simple HRV app but I like to tinker so it does more than that. I feel confident with my HRV readings now because they are no longer subject to my emotions, and the bonus of being able to find a studied window gives me added confidence in the numbers I see.
The Gym With No Trees
Since 2021, I’ve hovered between 112 and 135 pounds. I cut all processed foods and focused on lean meats, cruciferous vegetables, root vegetables, and whole grains. I also stopped eating any sugar at all. None. And I only drank water, at least a gallon a day. No breakfast either. That part was easy because I am never hungry in the mornings. I learned that by avoiding eating I was only craving food for the first week or so. After that, I had to look at the clock to know when to eat. My current weight fluctuations are the same thing. I’ll start snacking, get up to around 130, and kill the snacks. That starves me to death the first few days and then I forget about food completely. Sometimes I need to be mindful and introduce snacks because my weight will get too low. I did not mean to start a 40-mile hike through the highlands of Iceland at 112 pounds, but it happened anyway.
My HRV is generally high and my overall health has improved. For example, I no longer require a CPAP to manage sleep apnea, because I no longer have it. This is not a medical claim about other people, but in my case the extra weight seems to have played a part. I’ve watched my resting heart rate drop down into the low 50s over time and overall, I feel great. The journey continues and I still walk every day. We’re now in Lebanon, Tennessee and my neighborhood has tons of hills and no trees. I hated that at first but have grown to love it. I think of this place as a gym. I pick the number of loops and the speed, and the Polar H10 does the rest. All working together to continue to improve recovery, improve health, and enjoy life more.
Now I don’t have to do anything but sleep, wake up, and get a number. It’s lazy, it costs me a battery every month, but it works.
References
Gronwald, T., Rogers, B., Hoos, O. “Fractal Correlation Properties of Heart Rate Variability: A New Biomarker for Intensity Distribution in Endurance Exercise and Training Prescription?” Frontiers in Physiology, 2020.
Togo, F., et al. “Heart Rate Variability During Sleep and Subsequent Sleepiness in Patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.” Sleep, 2013.
Xiao, M., et al. “Sleep Stages Classification Based on Heart Rate Variability and Random Forest.” Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, 2013.
“Nocturnal Short-Term Heart Rate Variability Reflects Impaired Daytime Vigilance Better Than Overnight Heart Rate Variability in Suspected Obstructive Sleep Apnea Patients.” Sleep, Oxford Academic, 2025.
“Feasible Assessment of Recovery and Cardiovascular Health: Accuracy of Nocturnal HR and HRV Assessed via Ring PPG in Comparison to Medical Grade ECG.” IOPscience, 2020.
Chris Sharp is a Grammy-winning rhythm guitarist (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) whose playing credits include Willie Nelson, Earl Scruggs, and John Hartford’s Stringband. He is also a Grammy-nominated producer. He co-founded The Nashville Collective with Matt Combs and is writing a memoir called Embracing the Paradox.