Weekly Weigh-in (Week 44)

Sunday morning yet again and time for the weekly weigh-in.

Been a hectic week for me, as this weekend was the opening of the biggest movie so far since the end of summer. That said, I've been pretty good about my food this week. Kept myself to reasonably sized meals, and often only 2 of those a day. Sporadic cravings for salad have been helping keep me feeling nice and healthy about my choices too, mental victories if nothing else.

Now, last week I mentioned that I was using some statistics magic to help me track my weight, and I thought I should give a little credit to where I got the idea for that. A few weeks ago I found a book online called the Hacker's Diet. It was written by a computer programmer who had struggled with weight problems for years and had finally beaten them and decided to share what he had learned in that time. While much of the book was things I already knew, the reading was quick and included a few things I either didn't know or hadn't realized before.

Losing weight is easily, and at least mostly accurately, abstracted by looking at simply the amount of calories in compared to the number of calories out, if you are putting out more calories than you consume you will most likely lose weight at a rate related to that imbalance. That combined with the fact that fat contains about 3500 calories per pound can help you estimate how much of a defecit you need to run to lose a given amount of weight. That won't really hold up perfectly in all cases due to varying body composition and what types of exercise you are doing etc. but it works well enough for now. By tracking your calorie intake and your weight you can estimate your calorie burn more accurately than the values you can look up on a table, but those are a good starting point for figuring out how many calories a day to start with.

Tracking weight is an important subject as well. If you just look at the readings from a scale every day they fluctuate a lot. You can reduce that fluctuation somewhat by taking your measurements at the same time of day, wearing the same amount of clothing, or various other means, but no matter how hard you try it will fluctuate, sometimes wildly. Why is that? Water. The human body is composed of about 75% water by volume. The amount of water you have in your system at any given time causes your weight to fluctuate, and factors like having eaten a salty snack before bed can cause your body to have more of it in the morning than if you skipped the snack and went straight to bed. So some way to account for the randomness becomes a handy tool to have for tracking weight. For that I have come to use an exponentially smoothed moving average. Which is a fancy way of saying that I take each days reading, combined with the previous result, and apply a small amount of math to it to help make sure that random fluctuation doesn't throw off the average wildly, and that things which happened more than a week ago are less relevant to the average than things which happened yesterday. All in all, it smooths out the graph and helps me see what my weight is a little more accurately than I did before. If my weight is above the line that day the average goes up, if it's below, it goes down. Pretty simple.

So, feeling good this week, got the tools and the knowledge to monitor what goes on with my weight and my diet, what do I have to show for it? Well the scale tells me that today I'm 217.8, same as last week. No progress, but nothing gained either so I'll take what I can get. This is probably going to be the last post focusing on the diet and measurement part of my weight loss for a while, though I will still be posting my weekly weight change each week. Stay tuned for what will fill the middle of the posts in the future.