Week 32 Wrapup

Aside from the running I did on Sunday at the hotel, I didn't run at all this week. I had a number of excuses. First of all, I was just plain too tired. Every day since I got back I've just felt completely exhausted. Secondly, I felt kind of sick. Both of my kids had a stomach flu type thing at different times while we were on vacation, and I think I picked up the tail end of it. I was never puking like they were, but I did feel unpleasant at times. Thirdly, even though I didn't run a lot while I was gone, I did walk a lot, and it was in shoes that were possibly not that well suited for all that walking. My legs just kind of hurt a lot when I got back, and I thought they could use the rest. And fourthly, the 14 mile run before I left did something funky to my leftmost three toes on my left foot. Since that run, they just feel weird, like when you jam your toe. When I wake up, it kind of hurts to walk on that foot for a minute or two but then goes away. It's like the toes are stiff and then warm up. It's a weird injury, but not significant yet.

I'll start up again next week, but it leaves me with a total of only 10 miles for the 2 weeks of vacation. I hope it's not too difficult to get back into the routine again.

Whether or not I gained a lot of weight on the trip depends on your analysis of the numbers. Yes, there's an 8 pound jump between my last weigh-in before the trip and my first weigh-in after. However, I've been arguing for a while that the only meaningful number when you're talking about weight loss is a moving average.

Because of the vagaries of a person's water content, the contents of one's bowels, inconsistent scales, and other inabilities to measure weight precisely, the only true measure of weight loss or weight gain is analyzing a trend over time. Way too many people get hung up on the loss of a pound one day or the gain of a pound the next when small swings like that are virtually out of our control anyway. This is one of the central tenets of the book The Hacker's Diet, which I recommend as a highly interesting engineering approach to the problem of weight control. This concept is by no means exclusive to that book, however.

I know that my own body weight fluctuates wildly based on fluid intake (witness the 7 pound loss in 3 hours a couple of weeks ago.) With the right preparation, I can pee a pound easily. I've had >2 pound bowel movements. A day to day analysis for me is just rather silly. So, in my spreadsheet where I keep track of all this stuff, I have a graph of all the daily readings, and on that graph I superimpose a trend line and a graph of a weighted moving average. The spiky zig zag daily graph is fun to look at, but the other ones are what I'd look at to draw any real conclusions.

If I look at the moving average, that ended up at 194.8 before I left, and is hovering around 195.2 this week now that I'm back. By that view, I haven't even gained half a pound. However, that kind of ignores the fact that I was weighing in the very low 190s before I left, and that if I had stayed home and just eaten normally, the moving average would have quickly fallen to match the low readings I was getting.

To illustrate, here's a chart showing the daily readings (the dots) and the moving average (the red line) (for the dates 5/15-6/15, as rendered by the online companion to The Hacker's Diet):


So, the way I interpret the data is that I really didn't gain a whole lot of weight, but I was on a definite roll weight loss wise, and I surely killed any momentum I had going.