Gyroscope Personal Records
Tatiana Van Campenhout
Tatiana is a 27-year-old designer from Belgium. She lives in Washington DC and works at Mapbox, the mapping platform we use on Gyroscope. While not racking up an impressive step count, she spends her days illustrating, animating and breathing personality into their growing product suite.
We were very inspired by Tatiana’s recent weight loss, as well as her consistently high daily steps and the beautiful running she regularly posts on her Instagram. She joins us to tell the story of how she lost nearly 40 pounds this year, and shares some tips and tricks that helped her get there.
Anand: Besides the Gyroscope app, what devices and apps do you use?
Tatiana: I track most of my activities with my Fitbit Charge HR, and I have the Moves and Human apps on my phone.
I also use the Fitbit Aria scale. For tracking runs, I usually use Strava on my iPhone. For tracking productivity, I recently started using RescueTime.
“Walking to and from work is a great way to start the day!”
Anand: You’ve been walking an average of 20–30,000 steps for the past few months. That’s so impressive. How do you do it?
Tatiana: Walking to and from work is already a great way to start the day! I walk every day (40 min x 2), which already nets me around 9,000 steps. Then I just needed to get out of the office once or twice a day to get to 10,000.
I’m extremely competitive, and once I found out that some of my coworkers were on Fitbit as well, I was determined to be #1 among our group at all times. I think in the last few years there have been less than 5 weeks where I was not #1 on my Fitbit leaderboard.
Here are some of my tips for people who want to reach their step goal:
- Find friends that you can compete with.
- Try to get up at least once an hour. I try to do 250 steps every hour, which is the equivalent of walking for 3 min. If you do that 9 times a day (during a work day), you can get 2,250 extra steps, just by being at work.
- Take walking meetings whenever you can. Whenever I don’t need my computer for a meeting, I suggest to go for a walk around the block instead. I also try to take all of my phone calls outside.
4. Block time in your calendar for a daily walk. Every day at 3pm I go on a 30 minute walk — not just for the steps, but because that’s usually the time I start to lose focus. Walking has been proven to help you regain your focus, so I might be losing some time, but I’m most definitely making up for it by being extra productive for hours after the walk!
5. No shortcuts! Don’t try to make it easy on yourself. I always try to walk as much as possible—even if that means walking through every aisle in the grocery store when I only need to buy one thing.
“Block time in your calendar for a daily walk.”
Diet & Weight Loss
Anand: What inspired you to get started losing weight?
Tatiana: After working at Mapbox for over two years, I gained what I like to call the “Mapbox 20” — the 20 pounds some people gain when starting a job that requires you to sit for over 8 hours a day. And those were getting piled onto another 10 pounds I gained during college.
By early January 2016, I decided it had been enough and I needed to take better care of myself. Since then I’ve lost about 16 kilos (over 35 pounds).
Anand: What was your goal and how long did it take you to reach it?
Tatiana: My initial goal was to reach 60kg (132.2 pounds — I still use the metric system.) Coming from 72.7kg, I had to lose 12.7kg (28 pounds), which I did within my first three months.
I was extremely surprised by how fast I was able to pull this off, so I decided to set another goal. It took me another 3 months to lose another 4kg.
Now that I’ve finally reached my goal weight, my next goal is to get my body fat percentage down by at least another 4%. I’m also worried about gaining back the weight, because that happens to a lot of people who lose weight really fast. So I’m very determined to keep track of everything I eat and do, to stay in control of my weight.
Anand: Congrats! Did you do anything fun to celebrate reaching your goal?
Tatiana: After losing that weight, I went shopping and it was the most amazing experience ever.
I didn’t know what size I would be, so in each store I told them I had just lost a lot of weight and needed a new wardrobe. I don’t think I ever got that many high-fives in one day!
“I started finding support on social media, by sharing my stats and results”
Anand: What was your strategy to start losing so much weight?
Tatiana: I wanted to maintain a 1,000 calorie deficit. My strategy was to start moving around a lot more and counting calories with Fitbit. I knew it was going to be hard, but I usually do pretty well when I have specific and measurable goals in mind.
I soon learned that the hardest part wasn’t the lack of food, or being exhausted from walking 20km a day — but people judging me for just wanting to eat salad instead of joining them for meals. Initially, rather than encouraging my efforts to get healthier, people were tempting me with high-calorie foods and unintentionally sabotaging my progress.
Finding support for your weight-loss efforts can mean the difference between success and failure, so I started finding support on social media by sharing my stats and results.
As a designer, I care a lot about the aesthetics of everything I post. Gyroscope was the only app that actually allowed me to share stats in a beautiful way. I started posting creative images of my daily steps and all my runs. The longer those runs were getting, the more people started encouraging me, which made me even more excited to run more!
Anand: What do you find useful about the Gyroscope app?
Tatiana: Most of the information available in Gyroscope you can find in other apps as well, but it never looks this good. And all the apps have different aesthetics as well.
I love how Gyroscope gathers stats from various other services and turns it into a unified experience. It makes me want to share my results with the world, which I previously was way more hesitant about.
Anand: What were the reactions when you started sharing your activities?
Tatiana: In the beginning, people weren’t that impressed, especially not by my runs. I used to run in the past as well, I just always gave up after a while. But coworkers and friends eventually started asking me about it, because they noticed I started running more frequently and longer than I used too.
People have been very impressed by my progress and a lot of friends and acquaintances have come up to me to ask me how I was able to get such fast results. I was even able to convince my best friend in Belgium to buy a Fitbit HR as well, and now we’re discussing our food and activities on a daily basis to motivate each other to keep going!
Anand: On your new diet, what do you eat on a typical day?
Tatiana:
Breakfast—The first couple of months I only had yogurt for breakfast, since I was still on a 1000 calorie deficit. But now I’m allowed to eat a little bit of granola and fruit. I usually try to keep my breakfast under 300 calories.
Lunch—The first couple of months I either had soup for lunch (because it was still cold outside) or a salad I would prepare at work with lettuce, tomato, cucumber, chicken, avocado, pepper and salt. This was usually about 450 calories! But for the last 2 months, I’ve been going to Sweetgreen almost every day. They have the most delicious salads.
Dinner—I’ve been trying to keep my dinners as normal as possible, because I don’t want to feel like I’m dieting too much. So I’ve still been eating pasta and pizza and risotto and all the things I love eating — just smaller portions and with less cheese.
FUN FACT—I’ve also been eating Belgian chocolate every single day during this entire diet! One of these is only 55 calories. But I’ll have to go back home soon because I ran through my stack!
“The longer those runs were getting, the more people started encouraging me, which made me even more excited to run more!”
Anand: You’ve been posting some amazing runs on your Instagram. Can you share a few of your favorites?
Tatiana: This run along the National Mall and the Tidal Basin in DC was my longest, and I finished it in 1 hour and 14 minutes. You can see the Washington Monument from the Tidal Basin in this photo.
I love running in new places. I’ve been trying to get away on weekends, to explore America a bit more. Everywhere I go, I try to at least run once! This was a run I did on a getaway in Charleston.
This is my crocodile run! When I was halfway through this run, I accidentally switched to the map in Strava and realized I was running the shape of a crocodile! I already ran the tail, back and head, so I decided to take a couple of detours and give my crocodile some legs 🐊
I wanted to make my training sessions for the upcoming 40km walk a little bit more interesting, because walking for 4 to 8 hours can be pretty boring. Trying to make a specific shape makes it a little bit more challenging.
I used Strava’s route planner to draw a cat on the map. It didn’t turn out to be the best idea, because I ended up in some really shady neighborhoods — but anything for my cat walk!
Anand: Why are you training for a 40km walk?
Tatiana: On October 2nd, I’ll be hiking 40km (about 10 hours) to raise money for refugees in Belgium. Refugees often have to cover long distances on foot to get to a safe destination, so I’m going to accept the challenge and walk to raise money for people fleeing war and persecution. You can read more about the initiative on the Refugee Walk website.
The fundraising goal of my team, The Blister Sisters (Stephanie Toye, Kristin Rummens, Marylin Meurin and myself) is €2,500. We’re looking for sponsors to help us achieve this goal. All of the money will help in offering 25,000 asylum-seekers a warm welcome!
“I’m very determined to keep track of everything I eat and do, to stay in control of my weight.”
To catch the next chapter of Tatiana’s story, you can follow her on Twitter and Instagram. Next week, we’ll be highlighting another inspiring story from one of our users. Follow Gyroscope on Twitter to get the latest updates!
