I think I drank too many organic chocolate milks after I had switched companies, and after realizing I was comfortably overweight, I opted to keep track of how my weight and waist sizes were shifting throughout the year. After 9 months of continual tracking, here’s some charts visualizing how those metrics have progressed over time.
Some idiosyncracies:
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Still working out some kinks in Chart.js, but the title isn’t appearing correctly for line charts and neither are the axis labels. Apologies to all former professors.
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Line breaks are for when I failed to record data for a particular day.
What insights could I glean from the data?
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I know that when I did a good bit of running this summer (5 mile circuits with a running club), and combined that with some accidental intermittent fasting, I was able to reduce my weight by about 5-10 lbs per month. This can be shown in the charts for June and July. It doesn’t appear as though going to the gym and doing strength training helps as much with regards to losing weight (or maybe I’m just not trying hard enough there). This seems to be a healthy expectation to set for myself; I don’t think I have that much weight left to lose before I can be considered healthy. Hence, I should do more running.
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Both weight and waist size data are extremely noisy when viewed on a day by day basis; therefore, I should not try to measure any results until at least one month has gone by, otherwise I might get false positives or false negatives and skew my emotional bearing unnecessarily.
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Breaks, such as a week off for Thanksgiving and two weeks off for Christmas, are prime times to gain weight; I think I definitely gained at least five pounds during Thanksgiving break that I have yet to work off. Continue to exercise and do something to ensure weight gain isn’t a concern during those off hours.
Achievements wise, **I lost *19.3lbs* since April of this year. I have also lost about 2-3 inches in waist size since the beginning of the year as well. I definitely think this is a good sign in terms of measuring for certain “life KPIs”; you optimize what you measure. I think going into next year, I will see if I can measure body fat percentage more carefully, and see if that comes down as well.
Oh, and also make the data machine-readable; I use a calendar template on Google Sheets to write down my data, and CSV exports from that template are not machine-readable. Using a simple empty sheet would save any hours of painful data entry.
One last (and very important) data sheet I did not mention in these charts was my gratitude journal, a stream of consciousness consisting of what I was grateful for on that particular day. It could be something as simple as sleeping in, to multiple events chronicling a happy day’s agenda. Maybe in the future I will do a word cloud or other type of analysis to see what I’ve generally been grateful for throughout the year, but right now I’m happy just writing stuff down.