Back to School

It's been a tough few months. When things aren't going well, it's so easy to just crawl into my burrow and snuggle up. I've had two vacations in the past month, and they've done quite a bit to smooth me out. Plus, most of my crises are not resolved, but simmered down to sub-crisis level. So before going back to work tomorrow - and school starts for my youngest on Tuesday - I thought I'd take a hard look at what's up with me on the diet and exercise front.

I weigh myself every day, on a scale that transmits the number over wifi to a database. So every day I see that number, and when I want I can call up a graph on an app on the iphone. So I have been aware of my weight, and generally satisfied that it's staying within bounds. But now, with two vacations just behind me, its time to buckle down.

The orange line is the weekly average weight, the green dots are the actual daily weight.

Here we are with the standard pattern - buckle down, hit the hard floor, and creep back up again.

But I took the time for the first time in a much longer while to look at my activity levels. I wear my calorie and step counting arm band every day, and look at the numbers, but there is no app that easily shows me the trends. That is up to me to organize - export the data, and then manipulate it into a form that gives meaning. This is an exercise I love doing, but its fairly inefficient.  I finally did this for the first time since February.

Here is the sad story of my progressively more slug-like experience:

The faint green line is the daily calorie burn, then there is a running 7-day average in dark green, and the flatter medium green lines are monthly average calories burned.

I am burning fewer calories than ever!  My good friend has a slow metabolism, and struggles mightily to keep the activity up and the weight down. As she pointed out with anguish, the reward for losing weight is that you naturally burn fewer calories just living, and so have to cut food or up the activity even more because you have been successful.  So the first year I collected activity data - when I started this blog and focused on losing weight - I was burning on average 150-200 calories more each day than I am now. But I've been at this weight, roughly, for two and a half years. And so far this year, I've really almost hibernated.  I haven't averaged burning 2000 calories in a day since last December, and you can see the "high activity" days in 2013 are much lower than the high activity days in previous years.

I kind of knew this, I kind of felt it, but it is useful to confront the stats.

I think I'm done sitting at the computer for now, I'm off to take a walk. With a Mary Richards bounce and smile.