The Year in Review

Happy New Year, everyone!

Here is an annotated graph of my weight for the whole past year:

New Year's Day to New Year's Day is eight pounds total.  And each and every one of them has been a grim battle. I blink and it starts going back up. This past week, I was not able to withstand the leftover sweets everywhere, and it added up quickly.

Perspective really matters. I could see this as a nearly wasted year. Or, I could see this as evidence that "blitzes" work.  Both last January and when I got back from vacation, I hunkered down, paid attention, spent my time on cooking and planning, and it really worked.  Last January, I lost weight every week for six weeks; in the summer, I only sustained it for four weeks.

There is no mystery why the weight loss stalled, and started to turn around:  I crawled under a rock and became a slug.  Look at my daily calorie burn, since I got the magic BMF at the beginning of 2010:

This graph shows daily calorie expenditure, with a rolling weekly average (dark green) and a monthly average (light green).

All of 2011 was lower energy expenditure than 2010, and September, October and November were signficantly lower than any previous months. The good news is, I've spotted the issue and have taken steps.  You can see the calories rising throughout the last month shown here, December 2011.  This mostly reflects the new treadmill and so my new focus on burning up some additional calories every day.

I have discovered there is a whole culture of folks like me, who love to graph and analyze themselves.  I stumbled onto a website for us, The Quantified Self, Self knowledge through numbers. They list over 400 software tools you can use to keep track of yourself.  I am continually searching for that thing that will make me organized and completely successful (my friend Linda reminds me to get two when I find it - one for her) and maybe its on this website!