Year in Review: Fitness

The Year In Review:

I think this year has been a bit better in terms of fitness. I think my high school level, walking 9 miles or biking 50 mile days side of myself, might not happen again for a little while (at least until I get into triathalons or something like that), but this year I picked up personal training and started to watch my nutrition a bit before falling off of that bandwagon. The personal training also helps me go to the gym of my own accord, because I want to move around now. I've also been taking more breaks during the day and going out to walk around a little bit too, and now that I have my car, I can also go out hiking in natural scenic areas. On the other hand, having a car also means my routine walking habits might have gotten softer. Cars are just so comfy.

Let's see how I did according to the tracker so far. Open images in new tabs in order to see full resolution.

weight

waist_size

iphone_screen_time

I think there's a couple of notable things here:

  • There's a noticeable downtrend in terms of weight and waist size over the first 3/4s of the year: I went from around 190 pounds until 175 pounds over maybe like 8 months. It's slow, but it's steady.

    I have no idea what happened in the final months of the year. Qualitatively though, I can say I didn't fit into my jeans a few months ago, and now fitting into my jeans isn't that big of a deal. In fact, I think my jeans are a little tight around my quads, which makes sense given the amount of deadlifts and squats I've been doing. So my body shape is kind of improving, ish.

  • iPhone screen time still is over my budgeted amount: Yeah, there's not much I can do on this front. Especially now that I have a car and rely on Apple CarPlay, Google Maps, and turn-by-turn navigation to not get lost on the Beltway, I'm even more reliant on my phone for this. I think on this metric, I just have to forgive myself and see how to accomodate my phone habits.

I think this is probably the last year I want to track my weight and my waist size, and therefore do the fitness calendar. There's a couple reasons for this:

  • Some of these goals have been replaced: On the matter of nutrition itself, I'm thinking about getting some boxes of food delivered, for example from GreenChef or from Territory Foods. It's about the same price as eating out, and it's calorically budgeted instead of eating whatever is on the menu that gets my fancy.

  • The data doesn't tell the full story: I'm not sure whether weight and waist size is what really matters in terms of fitness. I think I should probably rely more on capabilities, as well as overall feeling (e.g. the random pins and needles I feel at times are probably not normal). In addition to the Google Maps stuff, the holes left by e.g. iPhones only saving the past 30 days of screen time information leave more questions than answers in my opinion.

  • The apps I've built kind of suck: The fitness calendar app requires a fine understanding of matplotlib, but the more I work in just data vs. in a specific Python library (that honestly locks up the data in an archaic format), the more I favor direct data manipulation in a RDBMS. I need to rework my approach towards building my own apps (maybe Supabase?), or reconsider my approach towards cloud-native software made by other people.

So yeah. Time is kind of limited for me now, and I need to make new choices under the (good problems and constraints) I'm living with.