Check-In - How are things?

TL;DR: I'm fine

I've finished three complete weeks on my GLP meds. So far, my side effects are only gas and some often present minor queasiness. I treat that with ginger hard candies. I also am often cold and when I'm not moving, huddling under blankets. I'm tracking my food meticulously through the WW app (interestingly, it gets easier the more you track, because it offers up choices you have used before). I am now doing a pre-plan in the morning, to make sure it's going to reach my protein and fiber targets. It's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle - do I need to fit a different piece into lunch because it's not adding up? It's surprisingly difficult!

I lost some weight very quickly, so quickly it started to make me nervous. WW discourages looking at calories but I was shocked to see a couple of days were less than 1,000 calories! No bueno! I was eating to hunger, but I don't want my body to shut down into starvation mode. Now, I'm eating more by the clock. But still, I plan out my day with plenty of food, and then find I can't finish everything on my plate. Mostly, I put it aside and try to come back in an hour or two. Overall, I'm back to eating much more normal totals for the day. Generally I'm having two hefty snacks, one in the afternoon and one later in evening. The snacks may be leftovers, or they may be dried and salted beans (edamame or garbanzos, this week) or Wasa rye crisp with flavored nut butter, and fruit - mandarins and apples.

I need to rely on convenience foods or foods I will prepare in bulk for leftovers - I'm not cooking three meals a day for myself. My girl recommended a brand of bottled protein shake loaded with protein and fiber both - Koia - and I'll have one of those for breakfast after working out. I do have to have something afterwards, because while it's good, it does still have a bit of an aftertaste. My favorite brand of canned tuna, Wild Planet, makes a couple of tinned ready-to-eat salads, tuna and beans, loaded with protein and fiber. I have a good selection of lentil and bean canned soups, ready to heat up. I often add some shredded rotisserie chicken to them, to make sure I'm getting to the protein numbers. The craving for sweets has seriously diminished. I have usually just a single square of chocolate in the evening, and feel satisfied with that.

I did my first prescription renewal; it was pro-forma. I'm staying on the same dose for another 4 weeks at least.  I requested the refill via app, updated some vitals stats, later that day my clinician approved it, and sent it to the pharmacy. They acknowledged receipt still on that first day. Three working days later, (the outside of how long  they said it should take), I got a text telling me to pay. I did that immediately, and got a status update it had shipped and should be delivered the next day. But UPS didn't come through, the package took a detour, and it showed up a day later. With the weekend, it took exactly one week - I requested on Wednesday and it showed up on  the next Wednesday. I can't count on the one-week delivery, I think - I'll continue requesting the renewal around the time of my third dose, so I'll have two weeks for approval and delivery.

 I'm already thinking ahead on how to handle my next trip. I'm going to France! Did I tell you guys that? In five weeks! As it turns out, my trip departs on a Thursday, injection day, so that's easily dealt with at home. I return 8 days later, Friday afternoon. I'm really thinking I don't want to travel with my syringe and vial, worrying about refrigeration, sharps disposal, etc., and I should just postpone my shot until I get home. Then, I can either do the following dose back on my Thursday schedule or else switch to Fridays. I read that adjusting by a day is generally ok - it's 3-4 days that get complicated. 

 

So to address the big question, how's my weight? It's fine. Using start day to today, I've lost 3.5 pounds in three weeks. The past few days, the loss has stalled, but it's way too soon to worry about that. It makes sense my body will adjust after the big woosh at the beginning. I would like to lose around a pound a week max, so I'm on track for that. I'm working with my trainer to lift heavier than before (I just got new 25 lb dumbbells, woohoo, moving up from the 20s!) and I'm hoping my focus on protein and that will keep me strong.

My smart scale purports to track fat vs. muscle besides weight, but these readings are notoriously inaccurate. Still, looking at the trend, it thinks I'm losing a mix of fat and muscle, but losing the fat at twice the rate of muscle. I was heartened to read an article in the NYTimes this week that says while every weight loss will lead to some reduced muscle, there is no evidence that using the GLP meds leads to more muscle loss than any other form of weight reduction. 

I kept up my cardio on my inside machines throughout February on days I don't lift. I intend to keep to that. But I rarely left the house in February for walks due to weather, and I've got to get back into that before my next trip. 

But so far, so good! 

How's it going?

 

Picture yesterday.
I have a "start day" photo, but it's so
unflattering - not so much in the body,
but in my expression. I forget to smile!

This is week two of the weight loss meds. Today is Friday, and injection day is Thursday. I have found that this blog is very useful to me as a journal and a reference, keeping me honest in my memories. It's so easy for a memory to become a story, and as it does so, it morphs and changes. That's not all bad, but it's good to also have a reality check on the past. And so I think it's worth capturing what's going on with me even when I feel like the answer is "not much".

The first week on the meds was fine. I had a great deal of trepidation, but all I have felt is minor versions of classic side effects. My stomach feels full quickly, and remains that way for a while. I'm gassy (and I was gassy before, too!) and sometimes those burps seem to carry some acid with them. I am often cold - no more am I embracing the weather in full Scandi style. Instead, I'm huddling in layers, under electric blankets, and not going out as much as I was before. (My tiktok girlies tell me this is a common symptom.) My sleep varies, with several periods of being wakeful in the middle of the night, other mornings the wakefulness starts at 5, and I just get up. (One night I peed FIVE times, leading me to adjust my hydration schedule!) Don't know if this sleep disruption is a symptom, as this sometimes happened anyway. I'm consistently getting to bed earlier, which helps.

Wednesday, the day before injection day, I was truly hungry for the first time. And for the first time that week I went over my daily points. (My WW reset points week is injection day.) Weekly points had been accumulating, from leftovers and activity, so there was plenty of buffer in the budget. I am focused on the protein and fiber numbers, and it is truly an effort to get there. I just added "calories" to the summary stats WW posts for each day, and I find most days have been below their suggested minimum of 1200. I don't want my body to go into starvation mode, start digesting my own muscles, and become hyper-efficient, requiring heroic efforts to lose any weight. I've been at least close to the targets every day, but I'm now planning to add an evening snack every day I seem to be falling short. My work is to have an inventory of snacks that move me in the right direction, not ice cream or Trader Joe's treats.

The injection paraphernalia I have to assemble for
the actual injection. I had the instructions out for this,
the second injection, not trusting to memory. 

I'm trying to undo years of a habitual after-eating flop to the couch and instead get up and move around after eating, which is really helpful in reducing any discomfort. I'm also trying to slow down my eating, and I'm breaking meals into smaller pieces - stopping partway through a meal, but coming back to the leftovers after an hour or two. I'm eating, but I'm on a major campaign to preserve or even build muscle through this, and so eating enough is really important to me. For the first time, I'm really using the WW app to plan in advance in detail. I try in the morning to build a day that will reach the four-way optimization of enough protein, fiber, and calories, while staying below the total points.

I've talked to my trainer about the WL meds, and she's on board with upping the weights and really going for improvement, not just maintenance, to fight muscle loss. I've had great workouts, and right after the workout I'm drinking a protein shake. They are excellent sources of protein and fiber, and I've found a brand that is fine. It tastes good, and I'm able to eat a tangerine or something afterwards to do away with a not-terrific aftertaste. I'm also sticking to my 15 minutes of cardio on the days I don't lift weights (so 2x weight training, 4x cardio, one day off). I was exhilarated yesterday on the Nordic Trak, and again today on the stationary bike, to find it had gotten much much easier.  The purpose of the cardio is to improve my cardio-vascular fitness, and the last two days were the highest I've gotten my heart rate up in a long time. I'm trying to hit the cardio commitment for the entire month of February and I've tied the purchase of some fun new tech to achieving that. When I talked about a newer, higher commitment for March, my trainer wisely suggested seeing if I'm still improving with the 15 minutes - and I am. So we'll see how it goes.

What has happened to my weight, by day 9 of the meds? I believe I have ranted before about how I think about my weight:  it is not really the number that appears at any one moment on the scale, but an average based on the trend. Variation around that trend is caused by water, and other transitory factors. And certainly the weight has been as volatile as ever this week. Here is the picture:

My weight in 2026- turn phone to landscape
The small green dots are daily scale readings. The dark blue line is the weekly average of those.
The big red dot is the first day of injection. 
The orange fuzzy lines are the 5-pound range I've been in since midway through 2022. 

 My weight was at the top end of my range since the beginning of the year (including my mid-January vacation). My daily scale readings have certainly gone down since the first injection. This is not uncommon, in my first week of trying to lose weight. But I won't really consider I'm well on my way to actually losing weight until I consistently see numbers below the bottom orange line - out of the past few years' range. 

But it certainly is nice to see the trend line going down!

 

 

Baseline

 I'm excited about starting on the meds experiment! I think it's worthwhile to capture the baseline from which I hope to change. Of course, I've got the data!

 

Horizontal grid shows 10-pound differences. 
The blue line was my ideal weight, briefly achieved twice. 
The red line was my stable point after I started blogging, until I blew it.

Look at the picture of my weight loss history, starting back when I was a 35-year-old little girl going to Weight Watchers in a church basement for the first time. (You might need to go landscape on your phone.) The first Big Loss, more than 40 pounds at age 43, was done so easily. I followed, mostly, the Carbohydrate Addict's diet - very low carb most of the time, but not full Atkins. The second big loss, in perimenopause as I started this blog in 2010, was harder, but was pretty much the same eating pattern. Then, for several years, I white knuckled keeping the weight in bounds. I was in some of the best shape of my life, as I decided hitting "goal" was worth anything, I did - for a couple of days. Again, pretty much the same eating, more Atkins than not. Then, the classic rebound, and then I threw every habit and guideline out the window to go intuitive. I tuned in to myself, and myself wanted bread and pasta and ice cream. Since then, I've been trying to wrestle my weight back down, and things that used to work either don't work anymore or somehow have become too hard.

So here I am, relatively stable at a peak weight that I hate. It's about moving, and feeling, and spending so much time thinking about it. It's about needing bigger pants. 

Here is a zoom in to the last 3+ years.

Weight from 2022 to present.
Green line is short term goal.

My weight has bounced around in a 5-pound range, hitting the highest weight ever a couple of times. I've done some attempts at weight loss. Some were minor-ly successful, until they weren't. Each required phenomenal amounts of focus and concentration. I'm just tired.

As part of my "baseline" prep, I've also measured myself with a tape measure. Again, I've got some history on this, and yeah, I'm bigger than ever. 

My scale also purports to measure body composition in terms of muscle versus fat. These measurements are notoriously inaccurate, except when looking at trends. So I'll be keeping an eye on that, as well. Over the time I've had this scale, less time than shown on the graph above, it hasn't varied significantly. It will take a big change to show up, and that will be with a lot water-weight driven noise. 

I believe I've got about a decade to do some adventurous things I want to do, and this is the decade to give it a shot. Here's hoping the meds help me get there and do the things I want to do.

Weight-loss Meds Eve

That's a little bit optimistic. My meds are going to be delivered, probably Wednesday or Thursday. I'm tracking via UPS. Hopefully no more snowstorms to upset the schedule!

 I'm all ready for this. I've been preparing since late last year. I waited until after I got back from my big vacation to set this in motion, and it's taken a little bit longer than I had hoped. But they're on their way.

I've done a ton of research on this. I'm doing this via Weight Watchers, based on the experience of my pathfinder and an on-line look at reviews for other places. I've read pretty much everything on the WW site, met on-line with their doctor, and got approved. I spent time on social media and with ChatGPT (surprisingly useful for very specific questions). So I have a plan, which will of course be modified as soon as I get some practical experience. In the meantime, I'm staying away from anymore online input. I've got what I need to get started. 

A couple of notes about what's happening and my plans:

I'm getting Zepbound (tirzepatide) vials direct from the supplier, Lilly. Bit of a story, but the cost for vials from which I fill a syringe is half or less than getting pens. I've watched a ton of videos, from Lilly and others, about how to do it. I bought a sharps container for disposal, and read the regulations for my state. I'll have the Lilly video in front of me the first time I do it. I'll refill the scrip on-line, based on my experience at delivery timeframes.

I'm not too worried about what sites on my body to use, I'll rotate. I've thought a lot more about time of day and day of week for the weekly injection. While you can adjust the day after you start, it's better to stick with the same day, and it seems even the same time of day. That means I don't start as soon as they are in hand, but where and when I think I'll end up for a schedule. And apparently, a reason to focus on the schedule from the start is the med's effect on body and mind is greatest shortly after the injection, and it wears off during the week. There are also greatest chances for side effects early on in the weekly cycle.

One of the major concerns about these meds for old people such as myself is muscle loss. I already do the recommended weight training level of twice a week. But there are recommendations about timing of injection and exercise. For example, don't exercise directly after an injection (duh). More interestingly, the recommendation seems to be to do weight training on days 2-4 of the weekly cycle (injection day is day 0). Since my standing convenient weight training appointments are Monday and Wednesday mornings, I think I'll be injecting Fridays or Saturdays. (In contrast to some folks, since I'm retired and have retired friends, weekends are not often very different than weekdays as far as eating and social events go, so that's less of a consideration.) My initial shipment should be here by this Friday.

The intensity of the weight session recommended is interesting: sets of 8-10 reps (calibrate the weight so that is appropriately challenging), if exhausted, reduce sets not weight. Keep the intensity up to keep those muscle fibers feeling like they are needed! This fits with my trainer's philosophy, and we agreed a few weeks back to try to up the overall intensity and progression.

Recommendations for cardio for seniors on weight loss meds are weaker. There is the standard "150 minutes a week" recommendations, but most sources say if you need to choose between cardio and weight training, choose weight training every time. And cardio should be lighter in intensity. No marathon training or blowing through VO2 max. I've just upped my intentional cardio to try to use each of my machines every day I'm not weight training. I'm trying to do 15 minutes every single day, and once I've got that as a baseline, I'll up the minutes. But I'm trying to build the consistency habit first. And it's only 15 minutes! I should always have time for that. In contrast, when I rely on a walk as my main cardio, I have to set aside much more time. I have available to me from the Apple watch "time in heart rate zones" and I'm trying to build up time in a higher zone. 

There are also recommendations, sometimes conflicting from different sources, about timing of eating with weight training sessions. Apparently it affects how efficiently a body metabolizes the protein eaten. After discussion with my long time trainer (who just finished a certification course for fitness for seniors and who has a slew of other training and certifications) I'm going to plan to eat something high protein right after we finish a session. I never eat beforehand now, and my early training timeslot wouldn't lend itself to finishing a meal a couple of hours before our session. They also say don't do a cardio session after a "long fast" (eg overnight). I think my little fifteen minute session isn't a huge concern, even with some intensity, but I will definitely plan to eat shortly afterwards. This will have to intentional. My current habits sometimes have me eating more like a brunch, sometimes exercising, then spending time grooming and dressing, then looking at my ipad, then finally getting around to preparing something to eat. One thing I think I'll try to keep on hand is low fat cottage cheese - a little container has 18 grams of protein and just enough carb to provide some short term fuel.

I haven't settled on a time of day for injections yet. One school of thought is that evenings allow sleeping through any nausea. Others say the injection at night prevents them from getting a full night's sleep. I'm curious about how this will make me feel, so I'm inclined towards a day time injection, at least to start, so I can actually pay attention to what is happening to me.

 I'm laying in supplies of easy-peasy high protein and high fiber foods. I've been using the Weight Watchers' app for a few months and I fully intend to continue using it.  I already had a big supply of ginger candies and teas for nausea - used for preventing or dealing with sea sickness, so that's in place. I've been experimenting with bottled protein shakes. I go down the supermarket aisle with my phone out, snapping barcodes with my Weight Watchers' app. It's easier to use the WW points as a shorthand for how useful the bottle is, rather than analyzing the nutrition label myself. One bottle I bought I sampled was a chocolaty flavor, and the first sip surprised me with how good it was. But then, the very bad aftertaste remained in my mouth for a long time - until I ate something else. I poured the rest of the bottle down the drain. Yuck! That's why I need to experiment.

My experience with the WW app has definitely geared me already towards protein and fiber, and my habits have adapted. There is a "GLP" switch in the app which I'll flip soon, I'm not sure what it does, but I'm guessing it emphasizes the protein and fibre more than it does point totals.  Dehydration is apparently a concern, but not so much for me. I don't track it, because I am the water queen, always with a glass or bottle next to me. I will maybe use a refillable measured bottle for a while to make sure I don't slump in this. I connected my watch to the WW app for the purpose of getting more points for activity, but I didn't connect any of the other areas like sleep. I don't see that changing.

 Food shopping tomorrow and Wednesday, different stores. Then, the adventure begins! 

How Active Am I Really?

Or, Keeping Myself Honest

One of the reasons I started this blog is because I know how fallible my memory is. I cannot rely on my memory of how active I've been, what I've eaten, or how much I weighed in the past. I've been thinking that I'm pretty content with my fitness level. For a while this spring, I felt strong! This feeling is absolutely real, but it has faded over time. Now, I feel mostly ok, but I know I'm doing so much less than I used to do.

When I retired, I developed a report card for myself.  It tracks a variety of things about my life, from how many steps I take to how many books I read. I don't keep it up rigorously every month, but I actually do keep track of all of the components to be able to bring it up to date whenever I decide to update it. The last time I posted about the report card was about a year ago, where I only posted the comparison to the year before. Because I was still within six months of knee surgery, I gave myself a pass on the activity statistics, which at that point were looking not too bad.

Well, yesterday's comprehensive review of the data revealed a different picture. I looked over a longer period time - basing everything on 2019, when I retired halfway through the year. Pretty much every single way I look at activity has gotten significantly worse, trending further down each year. Sigh. I slice and dice my data, looking at different measurements, averages and peaks and valleys, but it pretty much tells the same story. 

What do I track? Here are my activity measures:

• Average daily calories
• Days with more than 2,200 calories (very active days)
• Average daily steps
• Days with less than 5,000 steps (very inactive days) 
• Stand time in minutes (new in 2023 with Apple)
• Minutes rowing (new in 2023)
• Minutes stationary bike (newly tracked last year after knee surgery)
• Minutes Nordic Track  (new this year)
• Miles walked (while "taking a walk", not incidental distance) 
• Gym workout days (tracked manually)

All but the last of these are from my Apple Watch. When I switched from the Fitbit in 2023, I noticed the calorie counts were substantially different (higher on Apple). I don't really care what exactly the number is or how accurate it is - but I do care that it correctly captures trends up and down. I redefined "active days" to not overstate them with the more generous estimates.

But all of that detail just above can obscure the main fact: I am substantially less active now than I was in recent memory.  I want to tell that story clearly and unambiguously, to convince myself that I need to get off my butt and move! 

So, after bringing the data up to date, digesting the big impact, I took a long walk. Then, I picked up the computer again and made an infographic to show the sad, sad, facts. Remember, I worked in data analysis all of my working life, and using data to tell a story is something I enjoy. So I amused myself quite well, learning how to make a totally new type of graph, and how to present it so it tells my story. So below, here it is:

So what is this?

I simplified my measures to the five comparable measures since 2019 (clockwise from top): Calories, Steps, Active Days, Miles Walked, and Workout Days. I scaled them all relative to 2019, as if that year were perfect. (It wasn't bad.) I display them on a "radar" chart. 2019 forms a perfect pentagon. Each year since then is another pentagon, with this year's data so far in red. We see that calories don't vary much, and neither do gym workout days - in fact, both are slightly better than in 2019. But daily steps and active days are only slightly more than half of what they were back then, and miles walked is less than 25% of what they were. 

Steps, miles, and active days are all increased by getting off my butt more. The more I get up and move, the closer those red corners of the pentagon move towards the 2019 pentagon. 

So it all boils down to this: make the red pentagon as much like the big blue one as possible. 

 

 

Stronger Next Year

My gym! Rowing machine along the back.
I just installed the bar to help with balance exercises.

I did not have a great year physically. It started with recovering from my knee surgery, carried on through a summer of increased migraines and still not up to snuff on my knees, and crashed and burned as a result of my vigorous (but fun!) sailing vacation, where I injured my rotator cuff and generally burned out my whole body.

Through it all I tried to keep moving and working out in my basement gym. (I love my basement gym, and I enjoy working with my personal trainer there.) But there were definitely days on the couch where I hardly left the house. I felt old. I felt feeble. I was fat, and nothing I did seemed to affect that. I woke every morning feeling like the Old Red Woman, bent over, stiff, wobbly, and in pain. I felt frustrated that my body was so frail. I was preparing myself for a new reality of being old and feeble. I told myself that I actually was old, almost seventy years old. Any time there was a news article that another celebrity had died, the first thing I did was check their age. So many of them younger than me!

But by late fall, I felt myself getting better. Stronger. More capable. Actually doing things. Feeling competent and capable. Walking still did not feel good, but I adjusted and spent more time in my home gym working with weights or my rowing machine or on the stationary bike my BIL gave me. I went back to the mental disciplines I had learned over the years of dealing with pain, meditating and observing the pain with kind curiosity. I had some adventures, on the water and on the scoot. I had some actual good days, where I woke up feeling good. Not stiff. Not bent over. Not feeble. Ready to face the day, get out there and do things.

The election results hit me like a gut punch. As I got out of bed the following morning, I was initially fine, but by the time I had walked the length of the house to let the dogs out, my back had tightened into a full fledged spasm. SPROING! I was bent over, leaning on furniture like a toddler doing her first cruise around the house. I pulled out my tool kit, things I know, deep down in my body and mind, to be true. First, mentally: "there is nothing wrong with you. You are safe. You are fine. Yes, the back is clenched, but it's not broken. Yes, the world has gone to shit, but you are safe. Your body is safe." Then I started my series of exercises/ stretches that I know deep down are going to help. I also reached for the tylenol, because comfort is an important part of feeling safe. 

This worked! It took a couple of weeks - the back clenched every morning for a while - but it got fainter, and gradually went away.

Around this same time, my primary care doctor told me that based on my testing, I have great lung capacity and a strong heart, but I have shit endurance. She prescribed aerobic exercise, specific amounts at specific heart rate levels of effort. The next week, my neurologist reinforced this - certain levels of aerobic exercise seem to have a protective effect on migraines.

The view my trainer has from my phone while we video.
I have all the toys! I bought my first weights in 1995,
and I've been adding equipment ever since.

So I'm all in on the cardio now, added to my twice-weekly strength training and daily warm up stretches. I have the devices to keep me going indoors this winter- a rowing machine, a (bottom-of-the-line no bells-or-whistles) stationary bike. I have a mini trampoline in front of my TV. And I dusted off my original, built of wood in Minnesota, Nordic Track ski machine from 1993! Using the NT was the first time in my life I enjoyed indoor cardio, back in the day. It needs refurbishment, but it turns out that while the old ski machines are no longer made, there are enthusiasts and through a sub-reddit I found a guy who sells refurbishment kits with the most common replaceable parts! It's on my list to get it fixed up - probably a few hours work.

I found that walking can't get my heart rate up high enough to meet my PCP's exercise prescription. I try hustling along, but the heart stays stubbornly beating slowly. Only up very steep hills does it go up- and I can't currently sustain that for long enough. This all may change as I get more aerobically fit.

Report Card

 The last time I published a report card was in January of last year, looking at 2022. I actually have kept up tracking myself primarily through apps and devices, and from time to time I sit down and go through the data trying to glean some meaning or insights. I haven't felt like I've learned that much recently, certainly not something worth sharing. I still haven't got any wisdom to share, and it's not that pretty a picture, but the data is what the data is, and there is a certain value in simply showing it. Keeps me honest with myself.

First, to get it out of the way, my weight is high and stable. No need to share a graph. I gained a bunch of weight in 2022 (Fuck You, Intuitive Eating!) and it's stayed on. I haven't been motivated to any kind of a big push to change it. And it's been remarkably stable - plus or minus four pounds. I do plan and track my food most days, but it's more part of planning how to spend my time than trying to morph it into fewer calories. And then, keeping me conscious of what I'm doing, to do away with mindless eating. I still weigh myself every day and it gets recorded on the internet, for whenever I feel like reviewing the history in detail. I chuckled one day recently when I got up and peed several times during the night and found the next morning I was two and a half pounds down from the day before! That's why I can't get excited about day-to-day fluctuations, the range I'm seeing is just water weight. 

First up: Activity. As always, darker is better. January was knee recovery time, and I give myself a pass for everything but workout days. My "workout days" focus on functional fitness, either in my home gym or with physical therapy (my PT experience the past couple of years has been a solid hour of working out followed by 15 minutes of massage and stretching). With PT from the knee replacement added to working out in the home gym, I was really doing a lot. It also paid off, as now my calories and steps are back to where they were last year (which was NOT a stellar year for activity, I admit). The walking mileage shown here is from taking a deliberate walk where I activate my GPS, not an accumulation of steps during the day. I'm currently pretty active in the house and garden, which keeps my steps up, but I haven't been feeling the walk as a way to spend time (and I only do short and slow training walks with the dog, not worth tracking.) I've added a new row since the last time I posted, "stand time". My apple watch tracks this - how much time do I spend on my feet all day. It seems worth looking at, since my goals involve being less sedentary. Here, I'm moving in the right direction!

Next, some health parameters. These are both controllable and uncontrollable things. The big worrying trend is migraines, which are up. I have fallen off the meditation bandwagon, and that might be a contributing factor. But my doctor thinks that perhaps allergies are acting up - and there is a connection between respiratory inflammation and migraines. So I'm trying to be more faithful on OTC allergy remedies. "Alone days" (still looking for a better descriptor) are days I don't talk to anyone. I might be texting or emailing, but it only counts if I talk to someone either in person or on the phone. I really enjoy days on my own, but I am aware it is not healthy to have too many. And besides, I enjoy my family, friends and neighbors! I continue to be a sleep champion, with a normal seasonal variation of less sleep with longer daylight hours. (These sleep hours are separate from time in bed, as the watch purports to distinguish between lying awake versus truly asleep. I am awake at least 45 minutes during the course of the night - but apparently, that is less than average for a woman my age.) Heart rate variability is meant to be an overall measure of stress, with a high number being better. I haven't been looking too much at it, but the apple watch keeps track, so I decided to add it to the list. Resting heart rate, as a reminder, measures resiliency, with a lower number better.

Lastly, how do I spend my leisure time? (Ok, it's all leisure time. I do a minor amount of volunteer work, but I'm not tracking that here.) This whole category is not necessarily "more is better", but it is what it is. I also struggle with whether the "year" column should show an average of the months, or a cumulative total for the year. It's currently a mixed bag. I've actually wanted to read fewer books this year, because I read a lot of fluffy entertainment and it gets in the way of doing more productive things. My TV watching is up recently, as I indulged myself with a season of my only reality TV show, "Below Decks". I haven't been watching movies, neither at home nor out. I have been traveling a modest amount this year, more shorter trips, which is suiting me right now. And I'm hoping for more sailing, as my partner has retired, which multiplies the number of possibilities of aligning our two schedules and the weather.

So that's the story in numbers. Looking at this does motivate me to move, so I'm off to do that now.

Excelsior!

What Have I Learned From 35 Years of Tracking My Weight

Would I like to lose weight? Yes.

Will I lose weight? Maybe.

Look at this picture (if you are on a phone turn it sideways):

The horizontal grid lines are ten pounds apart.
The blue line was my goal weight for most of this time period.
The red line is a place I'd be happy to be now.

This is the last 35 years of my life, as told by my weight. Key on the numbers:

1. 1988: I join weight watchers for the first time, at age 33. The weight I was then is a weight I would love to be now!
   
2. 1997: I move from Chicago to DC for a major career change, the same week my father dies. After about a year settling in, I buckle down and lose weight.
   
3. 2008: My sister dies unexpectedly, resulting in a major lifestyle change as I become a parent in the midst of grief.
   
4. 2010: I start this blog, determined to gain control over at least the physical parts of my life as life with grief-stricken adolescents remains chaotic. I de-emphasize work.
   
5. 2019: I retire, which blows up every habit I ever had. And then the pandemic strikes.
   
6. 2022: I embrace "intuitive eating", buying and eating whatever I want whenever I want.
   

Why do I keep coming back to this picture? Am I just wallowing in fact that my current weight is right up at my all time peak from 25 years ago? What can I learn by looking at this history, enriched with other stories of my life? Memories are faulty, but here my actual weight is recorded accurately. Looking back over this blog has also been helpful, to color in what was going on in my life during the ups and downs recorded on the graph. Here are some tidbits I've gleaned from anchoring my other memories in the truth of my weight:

• Losing a lot of weight for me is likely to happen relatively quickly, if at all.
• Not paying attention to what I eat and what I weigh means I'll gain weight.
• Each significant weight loss involved eating low carb a lot of the time, not eliminating sweets entirely, and never choosing low-calorie formulations of real food but instead cooking and eating more vegetables and meat from scratch.
• Each significant weight loss required a great deal of attention and focus, taking up bandwidth in my life.
  
• Each weight loss period was also associated with increased exercise and conscious activity levels.
  

How might I turn the above information into actual weight loss? Do I have the motivation and interest to focus on this? Stay tuned, I guess, because I don't know the answer yet.

A Year (+) of Intuitive Eating

(Note: to see this graph on a phone, turn horizontally.) This is my weight graph from 1988 to the present. The actual pound numbers are deliberately left off, but the horizontal grid lines are ten pounds apart. The blue horizontal line is my aspirational "goal weight" (to which I no longer aspire) and the red horizontal line is where my body seemed to have settled during late middle age, and where I'd be thrilled to get back to. See how my weight shot up faster than ever in 2022, when I first read "Intuitive Eating".

I first wrote about Intuitive Eating (The Thing) back in January a year ago. I revisited it later that month, and then, in May, wrote a "Fuck You, Intuitive Eating" post.  I had gained more than 15 pounds, and was was extremely annoyed with having done so. Never-the-less, I didn't reject everything the book, and the approach, had to say. I had made some changes, learned some things, and it has stuck with me.

I pretty much spent last year telling myself I was going to ignore my weight and focus on activity, as a way of being more fit and stronger, not as a way to lose weight. I've had some physical challenges, from my knees and my back and getting covid, so my progress is not what I'd like it to be. But I don’t want to ignore my weight any longer.

The Intuitive Eating principles are good, and there is nothing in them I will disagree with. To refresh memories, here they are: 

1. Reject the Diet Mentality
2. Honor Your Hunger
3. Make Peace with Food
4. Challenge the Food Police
5. Feel Your Fullness
6. Discover the Satisfaction Factor
7. Cope with Your Feelings Without Food
8. Respect Your Body
9. Exercise: Feel the Difference
10. Honor Your Health: Gentle Nutrition

But the implementation seems to wander into territories I do disagree with. I joined a Facebook group specifically aimed at beginners to IE, with moderators and others answering questions. There, IE seems to be based on these ideas:

1. Few people actually lose weight on diets.
2. Of those who do, almost all gain it all back, or more.
3. And so, don’t bother trying to lose weight. It won’t work.
4. All food is morally equivalent and emotionally equivalent.
5. Any restrictions on what you eat will inevitably lead to boomerang overeating. 
6. Eventually, if you just eat what you want, you will naturally eat well. (But not be skinny).
7. Weight cycling can be worse for health than being fat.
   
8. It's possible to be healthy and fat.
9. The medical system will blame ills to being fat rather than treating the actual illness.
10. Any suggestion that being fat is bad for you is fat shaming.
    

There is truth in all of these, but they are not irreversible laws of the universe. My own personal experience challenges the first two points: I lost over forty pounds twenty-five years ago, and yes, I gained it all back - this year - twenty-five years later! There is no question in my mind that my life has been better in many dimensions because of twenty-five years of weighing less. I could move better, wear nicer clothes, achieve more social and professional acceptance, all because of weighing less. Much of this is societal, not health, oriented, but hey, I live in this world and that stuff matters. Were my health outcomes better? I don't know - I have had back and knee problems, and migraines, all along these 25 years and I don't think it's all tied to when I weighed more.

One more point to rag on IE folks: all foods being morally and emotionally equivalent. Not ever going to happen. I know things about food, nutrition facts, yes, but also facts about their origin and their impact on the planet and things living on it. Also, I do have some decades of having memories tied up in foods. So not all equal, no way. This is where I got into some arguments with the folks on the IE forum. Some are intransigent on the topic "All food is processed, even if it's to pluck from a tree and brush it off before biting it. So there is nothing wrong with processed food." This is where the cult comes in. Can't argue with cult members.

So what have I learned from IE?

I deliberately sought out and ate foods that I have been avoiding, more or less, for the last twenty-five years. Specifically, bread and pasta. Sweets too, of course, but more so bread and pasta. And guess what?  I still could have a love affair with the white flour products. They still taste good, sometimes wonderful. But making them an everyday part of most meals does not feel good to me. They taste good, and my body feels fine right afterwards, but I am very aware there is a longer term reaction to them. They make me crazy and I want more and more. This is over the long term, hours and days. If I eat them daily, the urge to eat more and more stays permanently. So, surprise surprise, the way I ate twenty-five years ago, steering away from the bread and pasta, is the way I feel better. 

So here’s what I’m thinking. When I get a carb-type craving, I might go ahead and make pasta or bread, but I might also steer towards beans, peas, eggplants, other roasted veggies with a sauce... I can get the immediate soothing fullness from those foods and I'm more likely to skip the craziness later. This is a useful learning, and helps me avoid the rebound/rebellion effect from simply saying "I can't have them". But if I really want them, I can have them. I keep bread in the freezer and pasta in the cupboard. (As an aside, the jury is still out on oatmeal. I started making steel cut oats in the instant pot, and eating no more than half a cup with toppings for breakfast. Unlike most starches, it didn’t result in early insistent hunger pangs in just a couple of hours most days, instead carrying me to a late lunch if necessary. So I may keep oatmeal in the breakfast rotation for a while.)

The IE folks really want you to throw away your scale. Not going to happen. Not when I've got 25 years worth of daily data to look at! But my scale is wifi connected - every time I step on the scale it stores the data on the web. I covered up the number display with a post-it note, and I would go a while -weeks - before looking at the numbers to see where I am. That's how I know that I gained 15 pounds. I didn't look at the numbers often, but I was aware I was gaining. I just didn't care. Much. I cared (and still care) much more about clothes, those that grew tight and then stopped fitting at all. Sigh. Some of that is comfort, and some of it is looks. And some of it is being cheap and not wanting to buy new things when I liked the old clothes. I took the cover off my weight display and watched it every morning for a while, and then I decided I prefer to cover it up and instead think about my weight when I want to think about it, not routinely first thing every morning.  But I like knowing the data is there when I want to look at it.

The folks in the IE forum constantly remind us that IE is not the "hunger / fullness" diet. Too bad. I think understanding and acting on hunger and fullness are critical for me to be the healthiest I can be. I've been pretty internal lately about why I'm eating what I'm eating, when I eat it. I still have to fight the urge to always clean my plate, and I’m avoiding that issue by dishing out smaller portions with full understanding I’ll go get more if I feel like it. Sometimes I do, often I don’t.

One thing the IE folks get right is that it is OK to eat to soothe yourself. Feeling your emotions fully is important, but it's also ok to soothe yourself with comfort foods. And to avoid feeling deprived, to avoid the boomerang effect, go ahead and eat those things you are obsessing over. The basic premise, that eating Cheetos for dinner one night isn’t going to kill you and you shouldn’t feel pangs of guilt over it, is absolutely true. But Cheetos are a food that is specifically engineered to overcome the body’s wisdom (ie intuition) and so if they are a regular part of the meal rotation, simply tuning into your body to see if you want them is not going to give a good answer. It was in this Cheetos discussion that I decided I had to part company with the IE folks who keep saying all foods are equally good. No foods are inherently bad, but that doesn’t make them equal.

A word about sweets, candy, cookies, cakes. After I eat dinner, I want something sweet. There are some things that most days I can (and do) eat just a bit of and be done- Dove dark chocolates, Gin-gin ginger candies. Other things, cookies and cakes and ice cream, I’m going to want to eat a lot of. So I’m not banning anything, but for the time being I’m less likely to buy those other things and bring them home. I’ve found it relatively easy to pass them up at the store, or even in an unopened box at home. If I want them, I’ll eat them and that’s that. But I don’t want to munch casually and mindlessly, so I’ll make it just a bit more difficult to get them. If I could buy just a quarter cup of Jeni’s splendid double dark chocolate ice cream, I would, but sadly it comes in pints and I’m not tuned in enough to stop at a single small scoop from the larger container. Most days, anyway.

So that’s where I am. I am going to try to lose weight, by modifying what and how much I eat, though not drastically and not obsessively. And the focus on physical activity and trying to get strong remains more important to me than the weight.

Let's Put 2022 to Bed

 Let's wrap this puppy up. While I didn't do a lot of posting about the metrics of my life, I did keep up my spreadsheets and graphs. I find it is helpful to have a "just the facts" look at how my life is unfolding. Memory is unreliable, and these numbers tell a story.

Here is 2022 by month, and yearly totals for the last four years. In general, darker is better. 
I put migraines in red and reversed this (darker is worse).  And in the bottom (yellow) section, I'm not sure more is always better - more books, for example, is not always better.

 The whole overview of the year is above, complete with context from prior years. Looking first at the yearly trends, look at the first section - activity measures. It's been downhill since 2019 (when I retired partway through the year). But I managed to turn around the downhill trend on some of these things - 2022 was more active by some measures than 2021. This was and is a hard fought battle. I didn't bike at all, I ran one whole mile, but I did get out there and walk! But not every day, by no means. I had more low activity days (days with less than 5,000 steps) than ever before, by a fairly wide margin.

The next little section shows the sad story of my weight - after holding it steady for the previous three years, I put on fifteen pounds and tied with my previous all time high. Let's just leave that there for now.

The next section contains some measures of wellness. I fell off the formal meditation bandwagon big time, this year. I believe I incorporate moments of mindfulness throughout my life in ways I didn't before I started meditating, but I don't sit for a practice much any more. In fact, many of the times I show I meditated, I put on a recorded meditation in the middle of the night in order to try to get back to sleep. In good news, migraine hours continue to decline! Two months with NO MIGRAINES at all! Woohoo! Sleep is relatively steady, and resting heart rate bounced around during the year, but the overall average didn't change that much.

The last section tracks various enrichment things. Again, these are not necessarily the most important things, but are things that are relatively easy to track and do show some softer aspects of my life. I was a reading machine this year, I wish I'd seen more movies, I hardly blogged at all, and likewise I failed to enjoy the delights of the city and city friends. But I traveled a lot, and I got a decent amount of sailing in. 

I've found the story of the ups and downs of the year are best captured in a graph of my daily steps throughout the year.

The dots are the daily step totals. The dark blue line is a running monthly average, and so shows the longer term trend hidden within the noise of daily variation. The lighter blue line is a running weekly average, so shows a shorter term trend than the monthly one.

So follow along the graphlines to read the story of my year. We start with an optimistic and motivated January, with several very busy days, followed by a steady decline in late winter and early spring as the bad weather and my bad knees dragged me down. There were some high points, but the trip to the Utah desert in March was disappointing as the weather kept us in. The weather got better during spring in Maryland, and I went out to California in April and I walked my brains out. Back home, I tried to get off the couch to train for my trip to the Nordic Isles in June and July, but pretty much I just hoped for the best and as a result I failed to enjoy the trip as much as I could have. I overused my knees and was often in pain.

I vowed to do better for my planned trip to Greece. We see a steady increase in average steps, facilitated by cortisone shots in my knees at the end of August, and steady physical therapy during September and October. Greece went really well, until I got covid. 

So the rest of the year was in the cellar, with constant struggles to get off the couch and move. The month of December has the lowest average steps of any month in years. It also has the most number of very low activity days. So I went on some walks, but consistency is lacking.

Steps are clearly a proxy for overall activity, but I think it's a pretty good substitute. I know that studies have shown that there is a clear relationship between few steps and all-cause mortality. From 4,000 steps a day to 8,000 steps a day, there is a clear relationship where more steps and better health are very tightly correlated. This is a correlation, and there is NOT a clear demonstration that moving from fewer steps to more steps results in better outcomes. It could be that folks in an unstoppable decline walk less. Is there such a thing as an unstoppable decline?

I don't want to end on a sour note, so let me say that right now, in the beginning of January, I feel pretty good, and very motivated to keep moving. I know deeply that moving more makes me feel better - there can be a virtuous spiral upward. So let's leave last year behind us, with maybe a few lessons learned, and go forward to the new year.

Report Card: Wrap Up of 2021

I put together my report card for all of 2021. It really is a good exercise, because it keeps me honest. How I feel about how active I am, how much I do of something, is often very different from what the actual truth in the data is. For example, I feel like I'm being pretty active. Yet, by almost every measure, I've been less active almost every month of 2021 compared to my averages from 2020 and 2019. Huh. I've got to buckle down!

I've deliberately put a single, relatively small image of the report card here, because I'm looking at trends, not the specific numbers. This won't make a lot of sense on the phone - if you turn the phone to "landscape" you should probably at least be able to scroll through the whole image. In looking at the monthly changes, darker green is better. Migraines are in red, darker is worse. The three blue columns on the right show changes for 2021, 2020, and 2019, and it's the trends here that matter. Basically, darker blue is better for the measure.

The top group is activity, and as mentioned, everything is down from previous years. In 2021, May shows as the dark green month. That was both high gardening season, and getting ready for the first big sea voyage that went in early June. The good news is that December was up by most measures compared to the previous few months (which no doubt is why my subjective guess is that activity is up overall, the well known subjective "recentcy bias"). One thing that was much better this year than last year is strength. I started doing video training in February, and am doing it twice a week now very consistently. I love my trainer, and we have a nice social chat while I work harder for her than I would for myself. That is going to continue for the forseeable future. I also did a couple of months of physical therapy for my knees, and that is basically additional strength training for my legs not captured here. But I would definitely say that I feel stronger all over now than I did last year.

"Miles walked" is when I set out the door for a walk, and record it on my Garmin. The so-much-higher numbers last year made me go look at the specific data for last year, to see what I was doing. It appears that last year, I made a point of doing the "park loop" almost every day - a mile and a half out the door and through the park and back through the neighborhood. Most were first thing in the morning, after the first cup of coffee but before the second. It was just what I did. And then last winter in the bad weather and the dark, with bad knees and migraines, and an ailing dog that couldn't come with me, I just stopped doing that. I've been out walking more, but it's not a habit or a routine, at a standard time, but something I work in around other things. Hmm.... THIS is why looking at this stuff is valuable to me. What worked before? Why did it stop working? What can I do to get back to something that will work well for me now?

Moving on...

My weight is relatively stable across the year, and for the past three years. I am tracking my food more often than in previous years, and I'll have more to say about that in another post.

The really good news is that my migraines remain at a relatively low level, down from earlier this year and last year. (2019 migraine data is not reliable.) I'm meditating less than prior years - in formal meditations, at least. I think that reflects two things: I tend to go to formal meditations when I'm highly stressed or in pain, and those things are better. The other aspect is I do informal mindful check-ins, a few breaths, a body scan, a gut check, much more often. I don't capture those, of course. They are just part of how I go about my day, like scratching my nose or getting a drink of water. But I may try to work some longer formal sits into my days - I think it has benefits in several ways.

My entertainment aspects continue to cruise along nicely. I read about the same number of books this year as last, and blogged about as often. Sadly, I saw fewer movies, and I'd like to do better with that. None were in theaters, so almost all were alone. (I watched a lot of TV in 2021, but I haven't found an easy way to log that.)  As things loosened up last summer, I got into town a few times, I actually went on four trips away from home, and I got more sailing in, pretty consistently every couple of weeks starting in March right through November.

Going into this new year, I really want to be more active. I'm scheduled to go on another hiking retreat in Utah in March, and so that will be my kedge for the winter. I know it's gotten me out in the cold and the grey a few times I would have passed on otherwise. Freezing rain is supposed to come in the afternoon tomorrow, maybe I'll try the "after the first cup" timing tomorrow!

Satisfied

I'll never be satisfied!

I've been embarked on an odyssey of mindful eating attempts. One of the main goals of this is to reach a point where I know not only "what" but "how much" I want to eat, I eat just that, and then I stop. Having just one exquisite but tiny little hand-crafted chocolate, for example, carefully selected from a free display, and then walking on, satisfied. Or, more prosaically, dishing out a small portion of one of my favorite dinners at home and then not even finishing that, because I'm satisfied. I truly do not want more.

As if.

As an experienced dieter, I have encountered various descriptions of this holy grail over the years. All of them are about how to think and act around food, and only go lightly on what to actually eat. No food lists or meal plans. Just paying attention to how much and what you eat.

I think there is a lot to this notion of listening to your body and acting on it. I picked up a book years ago, The Beck Diet Solution, with a Cognitive Based Therapy approach to eating, marketed as "learn to think like a thin person"! (This book was very influential in my starting this blog back in 2010, as one of the tenets was to have a diet buddy. There is still a link to the site over on the right.) There were a lot of useful exercises - self-experiments - to do involving learning how to recognize what we actually feel in our bodies, versus all the layers of thoughts and emotions we overlay on food. For example, she instructs you to skip a meal and check in on hunger at regular intervals, to remind yourself what hunger really feels like, while also discovering that hunger is not an emergency, you won't die, people live for weeks without eating anything. Also, to eat very slowly, setting down the fork between bites, and writing down how you feel before, during, and after. Make a daily plan in advance of all meals, and assess afterwards how you did. I found all of these exercises useful. Ultimately, though, the CBT approach relies on logical self-talk ("I would rather weigh less than eat this cupcake") in a way that requires self-discipline and self-control. After a while, it just gets tiring. It's a never-ending grind. Sigh.

Several years later, I discovered the Summer Tomato, a much more joyful approach to how to eat. Created by The Foodist, the basic approach was to only eat Real Food that tastes awesome (thus fresh tomatoes only in the summer), which requires cooking for yourself. Further, eat mindfully, exercise, and listen to your body. All good stuff, and reading her book several times, reading her blog, and listening to her podcast really did start to change my relationship to food. It wasn't a fight, because if it was a fight, you couldn't win. For me, it was still a struggle to lose or maintain my weight, but I definitely upgraded my food choices and learned to appreciate my food much more. She offered a week-long video course on mindful eating that I subscribed to. The main things I got out of that were to slow way down - fork down between bites - and to chew thoroughly before swallowing. And eliminate distractions while eating - tune in fully to the physical experience of eating and how it makes you feel. She promised the magic state of knowing exactly what and how much to eat I described up top as the result of fully embracing this approach. I never reached nirvana, but I started to make peace with where I was.

Somewhere along the way I started meditating, and I subscribed to the Ten Percent Happier app, where I am still a happy customer. They have a course on Mindful Eating, with Judson Brewer, who is an addiction specialist. I took that course, which goes deeper into the mindfulness approach than the Summer Tomato course. From there, I subscribed to Brewer's own pricey app, Eat Right Now. That had an intense month-long course on mindful eating. Some approaches I've learned from Brewer (that also work for things like anxiety and pain) are breaking the habit loop, RAIN, and disenchantment. Habit loops are something I knew about, but participating in the course helped me specifically note habits and try to modify them. RAIN (recognize, acknowledge, investigate, note) is a meditation technique where you turn in towards an unpleasant sensation (cravings, in the case of mindful eating), and explore what you are feeling with kind curiosity. This is called "surfing the urge", knowing that it won't last. Disenchantment comes from exploring your body after eating whatever, and really feeling in your body whether it feels good. I had some success with these things. I recognize a habit much more readily now, and much more of my eating is a conscious choice, though not always a wise decision. I was sometimes successful at surfing my urges, but often my urge seems to be driven from deep within me and doesn't dissipate after ten minutes or so, as the technique is geared towards. Instead, I might drive to the supermarket to buy ice cream, because I have an idée fixe that just won't go away. That's where disenchantment comes in - after eating, I can explore how my body really feels. As I started to use this technique, imagine my surprise that I can eat an awful lot of ice cream before my body starts to feel bad. But, there is a point where it does actually not feel very good. Hmm...

Then I stumbled on Corinne Crabtree, and her pricey on-line No BS weightloss course. She has taken bits and pieces of all of the approaches above and put it together in a way that really speaks to me. She is profane and down-to-earth. The basic approach is eat when you are hungry and stop when you are satisfied (which is usually less than "full). We are fat because we overeat (eat when we are not hungry or have reached satisfied), and there are three reasons we overeat:

• Lack of body awareness
• Failure to feel our feelings
• Allowing our habit brain to take over

It's all about self-discovery, no shame, only data to explore. I've been through her video course, and some of her supplemental courses (eg, "Binge Better").  I listen to some of her podcasts, participate in her Facebook group, and almost daily use her planning and assessment worksheets which take about 10 minutes to do. There is definitely a cult of personality around Corinne, and I love that she reaches a population that is unlikely to follow my path of CBT and meditation and other approaches on the edge of woo-woo. She teaches habit loops, body awareness, and even how to feel your feelings, to a really wide audience that might not otherwise hear about these things. And I'm not being superior here: the way she talks about them are very useful for me as well.

For the past month, ever since I covered up the numbers on the scale for my daily weigh-in, I've been really tuning in to try to find "satisfied". I've jettisoned any goals around pounds, instead focusing on what and how much I'm eating - but in a loving and investigative way, not in a restrictive way. I've got "hungry" down pretty well, and I feel like I'm making progress towards finding satisfied. Late nights continue to be an issue for me, but it feels like progress towards being what I want to be, someone who eats what she wants, in the amounts she wants, and is at a healthy and attractive weight. 

My meditation app, Ten Percent Happier, is having a weeklong new challenge course that starts tomorrow, on intuitive eating. Short videos and a meditation for seven days. It's all part of the same approach and it's likely to help me be focused. I really liked something that came up in a teaser podcast for this course: "It's not about self-control, it's about self-care".  Yeah, baby! I've learned a lot this year about self love and self care, and I think I may be reaching a real tipping point here in my relationship to eating. I'll let you know how it goes.

Weighty Numbers

I've been tracking my weight more or less daily since 1998. I used to weigh myself every day on an analog scale (where you leaned left or right to make the apparent reading change) and write the number down on a calendar nearby. Every now and then I would transcribe the numbers into an excel spreadsheet. I still use that very same spreadsheet today, but now I have a wifi scale that transmits the number automatically to the cloud, where I can access it from two different websites connected to the scale.

My routine is to weigh first thing in the morning without clothes, as I'm getting dressed. Some times "first thing" is postponed, especially these days where the motivation to bother to get dressed can be delayed until after several cups of coffee. Never-the-less, it's always before I eat anything. If I haven't weighed before I eat, I skip weighing that day entirely.

One of the things I learned from daily tracking of my weight is that the number the scale renders is quite volatile. It can vary by as much as four pounds in 24 hours. It's very common for it to vary by two pounds in a day. This variation actually creates a greater motivation to track daily versus weekly or monthly, as some weight-loss folks recommend. Since my weight doesn't seem to have a predictable fluctuation - not driven by weekly or monthly schedules, but instead by some complex equation based on what I've taken in (food, salt, liquids), what I've eliminated, and how much I've exercised and slept - I instead use an average or trend to decide if I'm gaining or losing weight. My excel spreadsheet relies on a simple weekly average, while one of my websites uses an engineering equation which looks at a greater period of history, but weights the most recent numbers more heavily than older ones.

Another thing I've learned is that my memory of what I used to weigh is extremely unreliable, from week to week or month to month. Having the record keeps my memory true, prevents me from either rationalizing ("oh well, I guess I'm stuck" when I'm really gaining) or despairing ("I can't ever lose weight"). 

With all of that, I don't want to lose my daily extensive record. But it's right now part of my daily routine to look at the website every single day. I think it's time to take a break from that, because I'm trying to manage what and I how much I eat mindfully. It's an experiment, and I want to focus on planning and executing that without regard to what I see on the scale. The point is to plan my food daily, try to execute mindfully, really tuning in to whether I'm hungry or not, and sensing when I've eaten enough. I want to be more in touch with my body, regardless of what the scale says.

But of course, I want to lose weight - I'm almost as heavy as I was when I started this blog back in 2010! Memory check with data: I've recently hit a single peak day that is eight pounds below where I was when I started the blog, and 18 pounds below my highest recorded weight. And that recent peak is about 20 pounds above where I settled for several years after starting the blog, which is where I'd like to get back to now. See why I like having the data!  

I'm trying a simple fix to try to meet these two points: maintain the data, but don't look at it. I put a little post-it over the numbers which is all it takes. Thanks to my wifi scale, I can step on it every day, have the number sync to the cloud without seeing it, and access it later. We'll see how it goes, how long I can stand to not look at it often!

The Activity Part of my Report Card

 My activity level through September was down overall from last year, pretty much any way I try to measure it.

June stands out as the least active month, and July and May tied as the most active. In May, I was getting ready to sail to Bermuda and started getting active. I was inactive (as my fitbit measures it) in early June. When I got back from the trip, I was zonked, and spent way too much time on the couch. Early July had me in Maine, hiking lots (some days more than I wanted) and when I got home I kept that up to some extent, getting ready for the Boston boat trip. The August stats reflect the lower activity from a week on the ship at the end of the month, though I did take some long walks in Boston before leaving. September, I started to turn things around on the activity front. 

One of the things about measuring, is looking only at averages can be misleading. That's why I add the high calorie days (>2,000 cal) and the very low step days (<5,000 steps). Back in my working life, I was going to get 5,000 steps just going about my work life, from the car to the office, around the block-sized office building to meetings, across the street to lunch. Now, to get 5,000 daily steps, I do have to work at it a bit. It's pretty much impossible to get there without leaving the property (unless I use the treadmill or the trampoline, neither of which have been appealing lately). Some days, I'd just as soon hang out with the dog in the house and yard.

I've read a few newspaper articles that suggest a strong positive correlation between more steps and longer longevity. There seems to be general agreement that very low average daily steps (<4,000) has near-term bad outcomes (ie, those people die soon) and there is almost a straight line increase in longevity as steps increase, up until about 8,000 a day. Above 8,000 steps a day probably has health benefits, but the relationship to longevity is fuzzy. (A very big note here: everything I've read on the subject from original sources notes correlation, not causation. Many newspaper headlines are sloppily along the lines of "Want to Live Longer? Walk More!". No one has shown that a person working to increase the average number of daily steps will by doing that improve their own longevity. Perhaps as your body winds down to die, you walk less.)  I care less about longevity than my quality of life, and fitness is so very important to that.

My trend on those very inactive days has been in the wrong direction, even giving myself a pass for June and August multiple days on board a fairly small ship with no where to go, and a need to hang on to keep from falling. I decided to aim for zero days of less than 5,000 steps in the month of October. While the dog is very happy to be out ranging in the back yard, he also approves of walks. To get my 5,000, I need two or three times around the smallest block here, with separate trips usually spread out over the day. I have also have a goal of having October average 8,000 daily steps, which means each day of only about 5,000 steps has to be offset with days of 11,000 steps or more. So far so good on both these measures, though 10 pm sometimes has found Bixby and me taking another spin around the neighborhood to hit the target.

I may have noted before that "miles" come from my Garmin running watch. Those miles only come from deliberate walks of at least a mile, not from incidental steps accumulated during the day. Those have trended up, as I go out more often on a trek or a run, sometimes with my girl.

Workout days suffered during my weeks of summer travel, but are trending up. I've noted that I just don't work out well on my own, and I'm regularly working with my long-time personal trainer. I definitely can tell the difference, that I'm getting stronger. I will do a shorter workout on my own, mostly on days I have been otherwise pretty inactive. I know my body feels better when I move. I'll often do squats or balance exercises while waiting for something in the kitchen, or sometimes when watching TV. Those things don't get recorded here, but my body knows and appreciates it.

Why a Report Card?

I compiled my stats for the last two months since last I reported. I have some categories for the way I look at things - activity, mental health, amusements, weight, and money. I've been posting the first three here. As I took a look at this, and looked at comments from previous report cards,

I also spent some time thinking about why these particular stats.

In my working life, I spent a lot of time with metrics. How you measure them, how you interpret them, what you use the information for. There was a fad in the 1990s for the "balanced score card". The basic idea was it was useful for companies to measure not only traditional things like finances and productivity, but also other items that could prove important to the company, like human capital and customer satisfaction. The theory was that things you paid attention to were likely to improve, and if your company believed these "softer" things were important, you would pay attention to them, try to improve them, and reward your people for doing them well. But softer things are harder to measure directly. Often they need to be measured indirectly, inferred from other items. There are tradeoffs around how much effort should go into counting the hard to quantify. And there are debates around whether the things you can count are shedding light on what is really important. So there is art as well as science to this process.

When I first started this blog, I focused on diet and exercise. I've been tracking my weight more or less daily since 1998. During my first Big Weightloss, I tracked not only my weight, but also my exercise times, recorded manually, into a spreadsheet. The first personal activity wearable trackers hit the market in 2010, just as I started this blog, and I was an early and enthusiastic adopter, poring over the statistics they produced. I learned my memory is not a good record of what I've actually been doing, and wanting to see a positive change in the numbers can be a good motivator for me. So I'm sold on personal measurement for personal improvement.

The approach of the balanced scorecard is attractive to me. Fitness is very important to me, so is my weight (possibly more than it should be). But clearly a well-rounded individual has more to them than fitness and appearance. But how to measure these?

So the things I choose to show here are partly chosen simply because I can count them. Just as I have a wifi scale that records my weight automatically, and a fitbit that does the same with my sleep and steps and other items, I've aimed at things that can be measured with minimal effort. I meditate using an app on my iphone that keeps stats for me. I track my migraines on an app as well - it'll produce a report I can share with my doctor.

How can I measure personal fulfillment and social connections and creativity? I need to start by trying to get more specific about what are my goals. So in no apparent order: I want to stay mentally engaged, including with current culture. I want to stay socially engaged, keeping up with good friends and finding new people. I want to travel. I want to sail. I want to be a good steward for my little slice of the planet. I want to support my family. I want to be engaged as a good citizen. I want to lead a bigger life than I do on the couch with my ipad. 

Also, I don't want to be creepy by recording every interaction I have with friends and family! 

So that's what's driven the categories I'm recording under the general heading of "amusements".  What can I measure with a minimum of effort that reflects the above aspects? Many areas are not measured at all, but several are, at least indirectly. 

Because most of my reading is on the kindle, and the kindle can be connected to automatically record finished books in Goodreads, I can count my books with a minimal of manual entries. I found an app for recording movies watched - it's a manual entry to note what I watched (but all the info about the movie is in the app, I just check a box that I watched it), but otherwise similar to Goodreads - it keeps the records and produces the stats. 

Blogging, taking pictures for blogging, making graphs for blogging, thinking and planning about blogging, is one tangible bit of my creative life, and it can be captured neatly by looking at the number of posts I've done. "Trips downtown" shows when I'm leaving my couch and my block to venture further afield. Sometimes it's to see friends (that's mostly from the Before Times), sometimes it's to shop, to go to a museum, or to take a walk. Number of nights away from home measures longer travel, and days at the boat is self-explanatory.

Report Card

 I have continued to compile and look at statistics about me. It helps motivate me to look at the actual data of what I have done versus what I remember doing. I like to know if I am moving more or less, how I'm spending my time, what I'm doing to take care of myself. My memory is fallible, so actually entering the data into a spreadsheet is helpful. Turning it into a picture can be even more helpful. But then I need to look at the data and figure out what story is it telling me? What can I learn from what I've been doing in order to do better?

So herewith is part of my report card through July. On the individual months, more green is better. On the comparisons of years, the darker blue is better. I've had to play with the sizing, so the numbers may be hard to read. Luckily, the actual number matters less than the relative colors (darker is better, except red is bad). If you are on a phone, turn it sideways.

ACTIVITY

By any way you look at it, I'm less active this year than the two previous years. In fact, it's been a pretty steady decline each year. The one thing that is better this year than last year (so far) is the amount of working out (strength and flexibility) I'm doing. After the gyms closed last year, I lost focus. But now I'm working with my trainer twice a week, via video.

To focus on this year, I really worked to get in shape in May, to get ready for my big offshore voyage to Bermuda. (See Kedging It works!).  My mileage and steps were up significantly from the previous months. June has very few steps, at least partly because I had a whole week on a 100 foot long ship - not so much walking required! July steps reflect not only my daily efforts but also a couple of really long hikes in Maine. I'm aiming at averaging above 8,000 steps in August, at least until I get back aboard that big ship. The "miles walked" records deliberate walks, where I start up my GPS to track the distance. So I could have a fair number of steps if I get them just incidentally while going about my business during the day, but a very low number of miles. You can see by the high number of miles in May that I really went about deliberately getting those steps in. 

Mental Health

 I tend to meditate when I feel bad. In January, it was dealing with migraines. In May, it was dealing with the tsunami of anxiety I had about the upcoming voyage. I had been hopeful that my migraines were on the run, when I got socked in July after both vacations. In other news, I'm sleeping less, but that is actually a very normal pattern for the summer when it stays light so long. My resting heart rate increase probably reflects both the decrease in my aerobic conditioning as well as my high anxiety during vacations. (They make me anxious, but I want to do them. I've decided "thrilling" is my word - I'm scared, excited, and happy.)

Amusements

 I am a master of distraction. I am reading, listening, and watching rather than doing things pretty often. I had actually set myself a Goodreads target of fewer books this year than last, because I think I spent too much time curled up with a book rather than getting up and doing things. But I also set myself a target of more movies, and after the Oscars surge I let that slide. I'm now, when casting about for "what next" in my unstructured life going to my list of movies I want to watch. (I didn't keep track of movies in 2019.)

I added something new here: number of days away. I went back and reconstructed 2019 and 2020 travel - pretty easy, since there wasn't that much. I don't have a target, but I do want to be aware. It turns out that I slept at home in my own bed every single night from March 1, 2020 (after the Brooklyn Bash) until I boarded the ship in Baltimore in June 2021. Wow. But I'm making up for lost time now!

Did I mention I'm doing another Pride of Baltimore II voyage? At the end of August, from Boston to Baltimore. I'm hopeful my anxiety this time around will be much less, since I have such a good idea of what I'm getting into. And it's another kedge to keep me moving!