47 Doctors, Data Galore, and a Problem Only She Could Solve | Giorgia Lupi

Jonathan Fields (0:00)

So what if the very thing that you were trying to do to save your life was potentially part of what was keeping you sick? For four years, acclaimed information designer, data humanist, and Pentagram partner, Giorgia Lupi, she tracked every symptom, every test, every metric across 47 doctors, wildly detailed spreadsheets, and two smartwatches. This was what she does. But when that data collection only seemed to reinforce her illness, her suffering, everything that was wrong, she did something terrifying. She took off the watches, she archived the spreadsheets, and fundamentally changed what she was measuring. That simple yet brutally hard shift opened the door to a recovery that had eluded her for years. Giorgia documents her brutal descent into illness in a hypervisual feature in the New York Times called 1,374 Days, where she turned astonishing amounts of personal data into a story that readers could see and feel in their chest. In this conversation, she shares the untold story of her equally incredible recovery, from being housebound, unable to work, barely able to move, limited to eight foods, and weighed down with a mounting list of seemingly unrecoverable diagnoses to completely rebuilding her life and her health. You'll discover what her body did in the exact moment that a doctor, one person, finally offered to be that one who coordinated her care. You'll hear about the tiny first entry in her new spreadsheet that really started the turn. You'll learn how abandoning online forums and refocusing on her brain and nervous system began to change everything, and why her working definition of recovery is no longer about quote, getting back to where she was before, but about creating something new, something better. So excited to share Giorgia's remarkable journey with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. And we'll jump right in after this short break.

Giorgia, it's so great to be hanging out with you. You and I have known each other for years now. I was thinking, you know, it occurred to me that if you had known somebody seven, eight years ago, they kind of knew you, what you, who you were, what you were up to. You fell out of touch. Maybe they moved to the other side of the world. They had no exposure to you, your life, to anything. And then they moved back last week. They bumped into you at a, you know, getting coffee at a deli or something like this. You look fabulous. You look exactly the same in life as it.

They would have no idea the journey, not just the health journey, but the really deep transformational journey that you have been on for the last six years or so. So I want to move through that with you. And there's so much that you've learned about yourself that I think is so valuable to everybody, because everybody is going to, at some point, be brought to their knees. And the way that we experience that can really change how we feel both during it and what it might look like to move forward from that space in whatever shape it takes for anybody.

Let's take a step back in time, sort of like in the before.

Paint a picture of life for me.

Giorgia Lupi (3:24)

Yes.

Well, I live in New York, and I've lived in New York for 15 years. I am Italian originally, but I really call New York my home. But before the journey that we're going to unpack, I think from the outside looked pretty great. I recently got a pretty dream job. I am a partner at this design firm, Pentagram, that has been around for so long. And my partners way before me have shaped a lot of the visual culture through brand identity, various kind of graphic designs. I was really excited about this new challenge. I recently started a new romantic relationship. And so again, the joy of starting again with a new person. And I was super active. A lot of activities, been doing yoga for a long time, dancing, snowboarding in the winter.

And actually kind of packing my time with friends, activity, cultural things. So I would say that from the outside, that was a bit of the picture that people would have seen about me. Then there's a lot that we can't unpack of what I've learned that instead was kind of going on in the background.

Jonathan Fields (4:33)

Yeah. And I want to wait on that because the unpacking, it happens years forward from there. But we're going to go back in time because there's a reflection that I think is really powerful. But in so many of us, we can be in that season of life where from the outside looking in, everything looks incredible. And we're probably even telling ourselves the story of this is everything I've ever wanted and it's all happening. And yet, things aren't quite right. I have certainly lived that and I'm sure I'll live it again in my life.