When you hear the word “gamify,” it can sound like a modern buzzword. But Julie Andrews sang about gamifying tasks in 1964 in Mary Poppins. In the song “A Spoonful of Sugar,” she started by explaining, “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game.”
Gamifying them can help with many daily tasks. You can turn doing the dishes into a race to beat your best time. Or see if you can load the dishwasher in the most effective way possible.
We recently read a story about a man who lost 40 pounds and reversed his blood sugar concerns. In part, he did it by gamifying his health.
Devlin Donaldson signed up for an app called Twin Health that made personalized health recommendations. It monitored him through a smartwatch and a continuous glucose monitor (CGM). Being given advice isn’t enough to change your health; you have to follow it.
He said using the app to watch how following the advice blunted his blood sugar spikes helped him stick to advice he didn’t like. The immediate feedback made doing unpalatable things more bearable. For instance, one piece of advice he received was to add apple cider vinegar to his day. He doesn’t like the taste. But in real-time, he could see that it made a difference to his blood sugar.
He said the Twin Health app taught him smarter ways to eat and move but recognized that his actions made the difference. “My twin is along for the journey with me, but it is my journey and I’ve got to invest.”
The app requires a person to log everything they ate. That helped Mr. Donaldson see patterns in what foods impacted him the most and how the order he ate foods in altered his blood sugar, allowing him to change his eating habits.
“All of my information goes in and it talks to me like a smarter version of myself saying, ‘you ate this, this was really good. You ate this, this was really bad.’ And it begins to give me this feedback cycle,” Mr. Donaldson said.
He saw his numbers trending in the right direction when he prioritized vegetables and ate them before protein. “My good cholesterol went up, my bad cholesterol came down, my triglycerides came down, my inflammation scores all dropped. I mean, all the numbers went in the right directions so quickly,” Mr. Donaldson said.
We often hear about people’s motivations for getting healthy. They’ll say they want to be healthy for their grandkids or be able to enjoy time doing their hobbies. We hear about people’s goals — easily going up stairs, running a 5K, climbing a mountain. And, of course, we hear about what diets or exercise routines get the best results. But, we rarely discuss the best ways to stick to your goals outside of finding the right recipes or exercises.
If you love playing games with yourself, think about gamifying your health. It isn’t the best route for everyone. If you have a past history of disordered eating, it might not be a healthy approach. However, for many people, it could be a fun way to make sticking to your healthy routine rewarding on a daily basis!
