My Weight in the Last Year

I commented briefly that my weight in the last year was a total disaster. While I ended the year much heavier than I started it, there were in fact seasons to how it went. I find that interesting, and useful feedback on what “works” and what doesn’t. Here is a 12-month picture:

So I gained more than 8 pounds over the course of the year, but not in a steady line. While I was working, I was in a state of heightened tension and deferring any weight control till I had time. The summer, as you blog readers know, I was focused on myself, both eating and physical activity, and was doing pretty well. Things basically went to hell after my mother died in September - I was totally in a “eating is the least of my issues” state of mind. I did try to tamp things down, but the holidays got to me. Now, I’m back to thinking very mindfully about what I am eating and it is starting to have an effect.

Weight is only one small aspect of my well being, but it’s not nothing. In particular, it has a big impact on what clothes fit, and thus how I feel when I go out in the world. So understanding that my efforts last summer were not in vain is helpful. And weight is most impacted by what I eat, not what else I do. So, mindfully paying attention is important to managing this.

I want to mention that posting weight graphs nearly always happens only after some short-term success at losing, so almost every graph I’ve posted on this blog has a recent downward trend. I look all the time, but I don’t always share.

(This graph is from trendweight.com, which I have been using for quite a while. Since I have a wifi scale that sends the weight to a database in the cloud automatically, this site reads the data and plots it. It also does a trend, based on an engineering algorithm to separate “signal” from “noise” - it looks at weight over a period of time, with the most recent data carrying more weight (he he) in the formula.)