Back to My Roots

 I decided it was time to go back to where I started on this blog - how am I doing on weight and fitness?

I've not been happy with either, lately, and I decided it was time to get into gear. As is my wont, I like to study the situation before taking action. Or if not before doing anything, at least as a motivating device while I'm doing it. We know it takes some sustained attention and effort to actually move the needle on either fitness or weight. It feels like the older I get, the more it takes.

I really got motivated when I looked at the graph of my steps. My daily steps have been going down. As with all numbers, it's important to look at them in context. After trying a couple of different ways of looking at it, I decided the time period of 2018 to the present makes sense. I retired partway through 2019, and shortly afterwards my mother died. So 2018 was a full year of office work, 2019 was full of disruptions, and last year was, well, it was 2020 and we all know what that means (amirite)! I think it's useful to anchor this look in the working world, and look at how things have changed as I figure out this retirement thing.

This is the picture that grabbed my attention. I seem to have been in decline more or less steadily since a rally last summer. This, of everything I track, is the most controllable thing. I can fix this. I need to fix this!

Total calories burned is a similar outlook to steps. I show both, because if I'm doing a lot of work that doesn't involve steps - like gardening - it shows up in the calories.

This calorie graph also shows that last summer's rally for steps didn't translate into total calories - so I guess I was walking more than I was working. Huh. Need to think about that.

Of course, I care a lot about my weight. It is something of a fitness indicator, just on its own. But I also care about how I look, and weight is bound up into that.

The two red dots show my retirement date and the day my mother died, respectively

Covering the same timeframe as the other graphs, this is not a great picture. But it could be worse. It's not all just going up. I made a little progress last year, and then lost some of it, and I've been holding my own this year. Can I actually reverse it?

For the ultimate in context, and to reassure myself that weight loss is, in fact, possible, despite current common wisdom to the contrary, I show you my weight since the beginning of time (that would be 1988, the first time I went to Weight Watchers).

I find this picture very reassuring. It tells me that my weight loss efforts have not be in vain. I was at my peak weight in the few years around my fortieth birthday, and all the years since then have benefited from being fitter and slimmer. Around age 55 is the second big loss (also the start of this blog). It shows that even now, as I feel fat and feeble, I weigh less than I did when I made the second effort.

This picture also clues me in on how unrealistic my "target weight" (represented by the blue line) has been. I hit that weight briefly twice, showing it was physically possible. But the orange horizontal line is where I settled for a while. I wasn't satisfied with being there - especially at the upper end of the range through which I was oscillating. Somewhere between those two lines would be ideal, I think. I would feel and look the way I want to feel and look.

I've also got my broader range of measures, the Report Card, cooking. I'll post when I'm ready for that.