Week 338 Update

I woke up Mr. Scale at 6:12 this morning, and he responded by saying that I weighed 198.0 pounds. That is one-half pound over my target weight, and well within my target range. My average weight for the week was 198.07 pounds. All my daily weigh-ins were within my target range (even though Friday hit the top of it) and that is good too.

My normal routine on a Saturday is to first of all take my daily journal and make sure that it is up to date. I check to make sure that I have totaled all the points up that I wrote down for each day. (I always write everything down during the day, but sometimes I don't actually total up what I ate until later. Usually there are a few days that I have to total up on Saturday.) I make sure that I have my walking down correctly for the week and so forth.

Once my journal is all up to date, I transfer the data over to my Excel spreadsheet, and then put the data into the Visual Basic program that I wrote that creates the HTML code for the basic layout for this week's page. Next, I put in the Table of Contents adjustment to include this week's page. I also add the data to the Stats page. Finally I update my Maintenance Graph, before uploading all these items, and then I get down to doing my write up for the week.

I always try to at least get my numbers up for the week no matter what, and then if we don't have any major plans for the day, I try to get the write up done as quickly as possible and get it posted on Saturday sometime. Today is day 2,367 of my journey, and, with the lone exception being a brief sabbatical earlier this year, this routine has been going on for 338 weeks. (Of course during my weight loss and first year of maintenance I was doing a daily update.) This guarantees that Saturdays will be a bit busy for me every week, but I still look forward to it.

This morning when I put in my weight into the Weight Commander it looked pretty good. The daily weigh-ins (the hollow squares) appeared to be oscillating back and forth, above and below, along the nearly straight line that the solid squares were forming. Then when I checked the Future function I got this graph, and it predicted that over the next 90 days I would be moving from 198.0 to 198.5, or in other words: I would be holding very steady in my target range. (A one-half pound variation over such a long period of time is statistically insignificant when you consider the way weigh-ins can jump around a couple of pounds between two consecutive days.)

So, all this looked pretty good until I remembered that I had a bump in the road this week and leaped up to 200.0 pounds on one day. I didn't see that in the graph. So, I went back in and checked. Sure enough, I had missed that day's input on the Weight Commander. (You know how you tend to put off that which you would rather not have to do?)

Weight Commander has a nice feature, where if you don't do a weigh-in for one or more days, it fills in the missing days with a calculated value that would fit in with the values you did put in on either side of it. If you weigh in at 195.0 on Monday and then put in 197.0 on Wednesday, Weight Commander will fill in 196.0 on Tuesday for you. This way you have an unbroken string of data points for your graph and other calculations. In my case, I had put in 197.5 for Thursday, and 198.0 for Saturday, and Weight Commander filled in 197.75 in the data base, and then it graphed that.

In reality, the calculated data was probably closer to what my weight really would have been if the excess water had been removed. But the scale said 200.0 and so I corrected the data. I also found that I had skipped one other day this week, where my real weight was below the calculated value, but it wasn't by very much.

Looking at the corrected graphs it doesn't look quite as pretty but I am still happy with it. My running average coincides with my weigh-in for today very closely, which means I am holding fairly steady around my Target weight.

The Future Graph, even after the corrections, still shows me only approaching the top of my Target Range in 90 days, and once again even a two pound gain over a 90 day period is not a concern: especially when you realize that I had a 2.5 pound jump up between Wednesday and Thursday this week. Small changes over long periods of time are not significant, because this is not a free forming uncontrolled event, based upon unchanging conditions. I will be taking an active part in attempting to maintain my weight over those 90 days, so hopefully I will not actually show a gain at all. In any case, I will remain in my target range through January even if I continue on that projected course. This is all good news to me!

Along the right side of the daily graph image you can see that my weight today is the lowest of all the days shown. Also, only my weight for 60 days ago is outside of my target range. (I inserted the weight for 1 year ago into this image, because I have it logged in my spreadsheet.) My maintenance has been far from perfect over the past 12 months, but at least it is looking much better today than it was at the end of March! And over the 58 days that I have been actually using the Weight Commander it has been going very well indeed. (Thanks Michael! )

This week was not uniform at all. I ate 31.0, 30.0, 38.5, and 21.0 points over the first 4 days, and then I ate 42.0, 41.0 and 43.0 points for the remaining 3 days. On Saturday, Sunday, Thursday and Friday I didn't walk at all, but I walked 3.2 miles, 2.14 miles, and 2.2 miles on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The scale was a lot more consistent for the week, with the exception of Friday when it leaped up 2.5 pounds. But when you average it all out, my weight held very close to 198 all week, and my points came out to 35.29 per day, which was down from 38.14 the previous week.

Wednesday was Halloween. Before we got to the holiday festivities, after Dotti's Weight Watchers meeting—where she weighed-in 2 pounds less than last week ( Go Dotti! )—we took a walk to Red Robin for lunch and then on to Borders Books for a bit of studying. I was carrying a backpack with our books and also for some storage area in case we found any new books we just couldn't live without.

We did pick up a couple of books and when I got home I went in and weighed the backpack. The way I did it was to step on the scale with myself being fully loaded, and then took the backpack off and stepped up again. There were two things I learned by doing this:

1. The backpack weighed 23.5 pounds.
   
   
2. Loaded up with my 23.5-pound backpack, heavy coat, shoes, and all my clothes and full pockets (iPod, camera, keys, wallet, change, etc.) I only weighed 236.0 pounds: 3.5 pounds fewer than I carried when I started my journey and I stood on this scale with nothing but me adding an ounce to the total number of pounds. How cool is that?

A Daylight "Saving" Time aside...

Our first DST inconvenience caused by this year's DST change was on Sunday morning when one of our clocks read the wrong time because it automatically corrected for the change on the day it used to move backward. Tomorrow, I will have to set that clock once more because the real change will finally kick in. My wish would be to do away with Daylight Saving Time entirely, but barring that, to just leave it alone. It is inconvenient enough without changing the rules every few years. (If you don't like where midnight falls, then move the clocks once to what is now one o'clock, or whatever suits your meddling little heart, and just leave it there permanently. How about simply moving it 30 minutes and splitting the difference, or is that too easy? Where do we get these guys from?)

In 1967 they passed the Uniform Time Act in the USA. It set DST to begin on the last Sunday in April and to end on the last Sunday in October. During the Jimmy Carter era they tinkered with it temporarily and then went back to the original. But in 1987 they just couldn't keep their hands off our clocks, and President Reagan signed in the change to begin DST on the first Sunday in April. Now President Bush has signed the law pushing the end of DST all the way into November. I can only applaud the wisdom of those folks in Arizona and Hawaii who have resisted this idea, and refuse to play this silly game. (I once had a student from Indiana laugh at me because I had to change the clock in our classroom one day after the switch had gone through that weekend. He thought it was funny we had to go through that twice a year. He isn't laughing any more I'll bet, because Indiana has changed its law, and it is doing DST too now. I can't bring myself to laugh back at him though, because I think it is a shame.)