Tracking on a Wedding Weekend

I'm doing a couple of things to keep me tracking, though not necessarily on-track. First, I'm doing the occasional blog post here, though I haven't really made you any promises, have I? Second, I set up an account on Beeminder, and I set a goal there of tracking seven days a week. I'm doing the tracking through WW on-line cool tools, and it's so easy. I get a text once a day, and respond with a "1" if I tracked every bite, some kind of ration eg 1/3 if I only did some tracking, and silence if I didn't. Because of the way it works, pure arithmetic on a graph and a penalty if you fall below the trend line, I have incentive to track even partial days, and that is keeping me mindful.

Stress is out the top of the roof around here. Work is truly awful and will be for some time to come, with a major problem that is my responsibility. My mother can't remember anything for more than 2 seconds and is very anxious and scared about all that portends (as are we all). My brother-in-law is trying to run his business remotely and is on the phone constantly. The teenager with us sits in an iPhone cocoon, in a world of her own. The older boys have various issues to be dealt with from afar: how do you get cash across the country to the happy go lucky college kid without a bank? MoneyGram! My alarm at 6 am to send a text to the high school kid: Did you wake up to get to your rescheduled AP exam on time? Who exactly is giving you a ride to rural Virginia for the weekend?

And the wedding... Involving two blended families, with step-parents and in-laws and a tiny two bedroom house to be set in order for an unknown number of up to 100 guests, including the governor of South Carolina (and associated security), stress was very very high for my brother. Our job was just to figure out what could be done and do it. Thus the trip to Lowes in my wedding finery, to buy another couple hundred bottles of water for the 90+ degree day.

But everything was beautiful, especially the bride. Happiness welled up from everybody and it was glorious.

But what about me? I tracked to a new highest point total EVER the day before the wedding, and that got me out for a run the last two mornings, to earn back some activity points to try to cover the whole. It didn't, but it's got to help. so taking just a moment to track, so easy, is having an impact.

Math

It's no secret I love the numbers. I find them very motivating. I love beautiful graphs. I love how meaning and insights can be gained by rearranging numbers, sorting them, using them to draw pictures, teasing out meaning by emphasizing one part of the data with color, intensity, or size.

But sometimes its the most simple recording of numbers that is all that is needed.  Once I stopped trying to lose weight, the weight started going back on. I still weighed in every day, but somehow the numbers I saw there were disconnected from my behavior during the day.  But then I hit a truly alarming number - the highest in over a year.  So back to the most simple and easy tracking system I've found - Weight Watchers. The commitment I made to myself was only to track, to meticulously enter everything I eat.  I did not make a commitment to even stay within the allocated points, only to write it down.

Look at how this impacts my weight:

The lesson to be learned here is so obvious, it's smacking me in the face.  TRACK. Keep my behavior front and center all the time. Do not eat unconsciously.  Last night, with a stressful week behind me, I ate ice cream. But I tracked it - I even used the cool tool where I could scan the bar code on the package and load it into the WW tracker automatically. So easy, and it so makes a difference - because I will eat less today to keep the weekly numbers down where they need to be.

Here is an interesting article from the New York Times about how mathematical analysis can shed light on messy real life. And here is the last bit from the article:

"There’s no magic bullet on this. You simply have to cut calories and be vigilant for the rest of your life."

A Mathematical Challenge to Obesity

Uncontrollable Outcomes and Immediate Gratification

I continue to lie on the couch while reading about motivation, self control, and activity. The latest batch of things I've been reading about have been on how to use social and immediate behavioral reinforcement to be more successful at long term goals. Apparently there is always something going on in us called "hyperbolic discounting". This is a very fancy math-based term for how we always prefer the immediate gratification versus the long term goal. An oft cited piece of research is ordering groceries on-line: when ordered for delivery that day, the order is loaded with cookies and snacks. When the same person orders for delivery next week, fruits and vegetables and healthy food dominates. This reflects our future good intentions. There is a constant dialog inside each of us between present me and future me, but present me controls all the actions we take.

This is tied to our difficulty in tying current actions to future outcomes. Today's doughnut will not necessarily affect tomorrow's weight exactly, and just this one has very little impact on our goal weight six months from now. Plus, there is ultimately a very uncertain relationship between eating, activity, and weight- we are not precisely controlled physics experiments. We are learning more and more about how so many more things impact how we take in and use energy and how it translates into fat, muscle and body weight. There is ultimately a long term and imprecise relationship between energy in, energy out, and weight.

But there are many things we can control much more precisely, things which logically will lead to the weight loss outcome. I'm trying to focus on those things I can control in my day-to-day life, and looking for those techniques which make the rewards and consequences of today's choices more immediate and stark.

The 5K run was definitely an epic win. It was a New Year's resolution, and seemed very far off when I signed up for it. If I hadn't been so public about doing it, I certainly would have trained less, especially once the first month or so of enthusiasm and rapid progress had worn off. I probably would have bailed entirely when I got frustrated. But fear of public humiliation is a powerful tool. Still, there were plenty of times when I elected to sit on the couch rather than get down to running. I had plenty of opportunities to make up the time later.

I love technology, and The Internet is filled with plenty of tracking, todo, and goal achievement websites. A recurring theme is to "gamify" the process- make it social, and make it fun, but adopting elements of successful computer games. There is plenty of advice about tying long term goals to short term actions by breaking down big tasks into little ones, and how to apply rewards and penalties. I've just stumbled across a website that has a slightly different take on this: Beeminder. Their plan is to set a long term quantified goal, and then (this is the different part) they plot a course to get there. You then report progress along the way (daily if appropriate), and if you fall off the path along the way-if you defer too much- you have failed and the penalty comes right then. There is clearly a band of variation along a strict path, and you get warning before you fail, but they have some good math behind their ranges and if you fall too far, they have a point where you simply can't get to the end in time.

Their business model is you pledge money for the goal, and you pay them if you fail. They do let you start for free, however, and so I'm playing around with this. Their number one use, of course, is weight loss, but I'm not setting a pounds goal. I'm focussing on things I can do today that I believe will eventually impact that. So, in a very meta use of the tools, I'm starting out to track in Beeminder [link when I'm at a real computer] how successful I am at tracking in WW. This is simply counting how often I track not whether I stay within points. This is very very easy and entirely within my control. But clearly I see a relationship between the tracking and what I eat.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Quick Check

I definitely want to keep running for a while. I managed to get myself down to the treadmill just now. I think my body doesn't want to do this more than two or three times a week. I've got another race on Sunday, and in the last one I pushed hard and it tuckered me out. So for the time being, I'm going to aim at two runs a week. It gives me plenty Of time to recover between.

I definitely am feeling the joy of having stretched my legs and my heart just now, though it was a brief time.