How I used Behalf.bot to transform my body

I just completed the 12-week "Body for Life" program and used my AI agent to keep on track throughout the process. Here's how I did it.

I just completed a 12-week exercise & nutrition program and attained some results that I’m really proud of. Here they are:

I’m going to share the key learnings from this experience and how I used the open source Behalf.bot agent day-to-day to keep me on track.

What is “Body for Life?”

This is a 12-week fitness program created by Bill Phillips back in 1999. You can still get the book here on Amazon - it’s very good. It’s basically a regimen of diet and exercise that can be distilled down to some very simple rules:

Diet:

1. Eat six times per day

2. Portion sizes are size of your fist and you should eat a protein, carb and vegetable or substitute a protein shake for a meal.

3. There’s a list of authorized foods and ones that are off limits (primarily saturated fats and trans fats)

4. Sunday = cheat day. Eat whatever you want. Pizza. Ice cream. Whatever. The sanity valve...

Exercise:

1. Alternate gym and running every day

2. In the gym alternate between upper/lower body each workout. Muscle groups: Upper = chest, shoulders, back, biceps, triceps. Lower = quads, hamstrings, calves and abs.

3. Interval training:

   1. In gym start high reps, low weight and work up to low reps, high weight. Do that for each muscle group then add an extra exercise for same muscle group where you go back to high reps low weight and try to hit a high intensity point and the end of each where you go to failure.

   2. In running: runs are short - 20min. 2min warmup then 4min blocks of progressively increasing intensity aiming to go flat-out during minutes 5, 10, 14, 18-19 then a 1min cooldown.

4. Take Sunday off. No exercise.

That’s it. That’s the entire program.

Of course it’s easier said than done and success in the program comes down entirely to your ability to stick to it for twelve weeks.

I had actually completed the program 17 years ago and achieved some impressive results back then. The open question this time was whether I could pull off similar results at age 50...

How I used Agentic AI to stack the odds

The program encourages participants to keep a meticulous journal of their meals and workouts by logging every meal, run and workout.

I started out logging everything in a notebook but wanted to have the info digitally. I teach a vibecoding course and initially figured I’d just vibecode an app to track all this stuff. But thinking through what that experience would be like constantly tapping on my phone in the gym after every rep logging the exercise seemed super annoying. It occurred to me I already have a capable agent accessible via Discord via the Behalf.bot code I open sourced and that maybe a simpler option instead of coding a new app from scratch would be to just make a dedicated channel for health stuff. I could then log my workouts via shorthand in a notebook and then just upload photos of the journal and have handwriting recognition parse those pages into data in a database. I could also have an LLM estimate the macronutrients of my meals and log those. Combined with my sleep and recovery data from my Oura ring this should give a really comprehensive picture of everything.

Using the bot itself to implement these as skills I taught it my shorthand for logging exercises and it became as simple as snapping a photo of my notebook after every workout and snapping a photo of every meal. I had it use gpt-4o-mini for photo recognition and at less than $.01 per image it gives me a decent estimate of the macronutrient breakdown of everything I’m eating and extracts the reps, weights, intensity, exercise, muscle group and workout date & time and logs it in the database.

With a little more work I made a little dashboard using FastAPI that allows me to see all my workouts, meals, runs and sleep data in one place. And because it’s structured data in a db it’s queryable ad hoc by talking to the agent.

I then have my bot Jax configured so that every morning when I take my Oura ring out of airplane mode it syncs and Jax gets the night’s sleep data and then assembles a morning briefing with a bunch of helpful stuff starting with a plan based on the previous day’s workout, meals, sleep, etc. It puts together a little motivational briefing starting with the health rundown and an analysis of the day’s Daily Stoic thought.

Some takeaways from this process

1. Could you do this program without using a bot to track everything? Of course. And millions of people have since 1999 but if you’re a quantified self person and seeing the data day-to-day motivates you to stick with it then the tools are all there today to make it relatively frictionless for logging the data and presenting it in a helpful format. I managed to make it the full 12 weeks without missing a single run or workout. On the meal regimen I admittedly averaged around 4-5 meals falling short of the prescribed 6. Had to find a feasible balance of convenience and effectiveness.

2. Working with agents gives you malleable fabric that can adapt to the way you want to work vs. trying to shoe horn your process into a brittle app that works its own way. It was less work to build and ultimately a better UX to just upload photos to Discord rather than build a mobile app for tracking this stuff. I baked the Body for Life skills into the Behalf.bot chassis so that’s a standard plugin that anyone else can now use. And I packaged it using the OpenClaw plugin format so that it can be easily ported to that system if that’s the harness you’re using.

3. Bill Phillips’ program still holds up a quarter century later. Its strength is its simplicity and I was stoked to be able to use what I know how to do to stack the odds of sticking to it and completing the program in my favor. Hopefully at this point the diet and exercise habits are ingrained enough to stick beyond the 12 weeks of the program.

I had Jax export all the data from my 12-week program and create a clickable dashboard replica of my dynamic one so you can see how my dashboard for this works. Click image below and browse to any day of the program to see how it worked.

And here’s a Loom vid showing how I actually use it:

If you’ve read this far, thanks for reading. I highly endorse the Body For Life program. I’m planning to share some other creative uses of how I’m using Behalf.bot to help me in my day to day. Subscribe to my substack to follow that journey and/or get your own Behalf.bot here. And if you want to learn to vibecode as a non-technical founder using Claude Code we’re taking applications for the next cohort here.