Tag weight (15)
daily weight tracking - one year later
Mood: hopeful
Posted on 2010-01-12 13:39:00
Tags: weight
Words: 144
I've been weighing myself every morning (give or take) for a year, so it seemed like a good time to look at the results:
Here's the graph:
Overall, I lost ~11 pounds in 2009. Optimistically, that's around a pound a month, which is nothing spectacular but not bad considering I wasn't on any diet in particular. Also, the overall trend was downward and I never got even close to my original weight.
Pessimistically, one pound a month is pretty darn low, and I seemed to stall out around September/October, and I'm not at my goal weight of 180, which is really above where I should be, according to BMI. And yeah, I know BMI is kinda arbitrary, but I'm not sure how else to find a healthy target weight.
Hopefully resetting the graph will help me focus on getting down to 180 and beyond!
5 comments
weighty thoughts
Mood: content
Posted on 2009-03-23 10:00:00
Tags: weight projects links
Words: 279
This weekend I was proud of myself as my weight hit its lowest level since I started tracking it this time. (since then it's bounced back up a little, but I'm going to ignore that for now) So I thought it would be a good time to look back at my previous attempts at weight loss to see how well I did.
And I had forgotten that (last very short attempt notwithstanding) I've done much better than this in the past. Right after college I was a full 15 pounds lighter than I am now, and even an attempt a few years later I got down to 5 pounds below my current weight. I really can't decide if this should be encouraging (it is possible for me to weigh less!) or discouraging (I've been trying for 2.5 months and only lost 7 pounds!).
On Friday I discovered that GnuCash (which we use to do our finances) stores its data in an XML format! So I wrote a script to generate a report on how much we spend on various categories each month (GnuCash has some builtin facilities to do this, but I couldn't quite get it to do what I wanted). The report looks pretty but I don't feel comfortable posting it to the web, so you'll have to take my word for it.
Related: I found this awesome ColorBrewer which helps you pick a set of colors for maps or graphs or whatever. This is great news since I suck at picking colors!
The British military put some of their troops on LSD to see how it would affect them. The results are amusing but not really surprising.
2 comments
angry links!
Mood: angry
Posted on 2009-03-04 11:01:00
Tags: weight links
Words: 67
Ugh, even my links are disappearing!
Sign of the times - Austin layoff database
Updated my weight chart to show a rolling average of 5 days (in dark blue). The bottom graph is a graph of my body fat weight (weight * body fat percentage) - it's pretty noisy but trending downward, which is good.
There's now a free Kindle reader for the iPhone.
Jon Stewart on Limbaugh and Steele.
2 comments
I miss music
Mood: contemplative
Music: Mozart - "Requiem"
Posted on 2009-03-03 10:02:00
Tags: music essay weight
Words: 106
I think I miss singing. Last week I couldn't get the Durufle Requiem out of my head (beautiful piece of music), and today I have the same problem with the Mozart Requiem, probably due to this 30 Rock episode. Maybe after the whole wedding thing I'll look into rejoining Austin Civic Chorus.
Another bit of self-reflection: The last few weeks I've been waaaay too moody. Insignificant things will bring me down, but then I'll feel better for no reason. I'm not sure how to work on that exactly.
We're seeing Watchmen at midnight Thursday and I'm quite excited!
Also, my weight sure bounces around a lot.
8 comments
friday links
Mood: okay
Posted on 2009-02-20 10:18:00
Tags: weight links
Words: 164
- If I were unhealthily obsessed with my weight, I would say I should get sick more often. But then I remembered I got my hair cut too! I should have kept it to weigh it and correct for growing hair weight...
- 25 reasons we love Austin - Salt Lick! cupcakes! breakfast! bookpeople! alamo drafthouse!
- The Clinton Economic Record and Rising Tides - that first graph was startling. The obvious point is that the poor did as well as the rich under Clinton whereas they did much worse under Reagan/Bush I/Bush II, but everyone did better under Clinton than they did under any of those.
- The Futile Pursuit of Happiness - long but interesting article. People generally underestimate their long-term emotional resilience; losing a partner/family member makes our "emotional immune system" kick in and we feel better faster than we think. The "immune system" doesn't kick in with chronic annoyances (that door that won't close, that aching ankle) and so they make us more unhappy than we predict.
0 comments
kinda down
Mood: blah
Posted on 2009-01-28 09:47:00
Tags: whereslunch weight wedding
Words: 137
I was in a fairly crappy mood yesterday, seemingly the result of two things:
- whereslunch.org is honestly pretty much done. I should tweak up the design a little bit, I guess, and try to promote it somehow, but neither of these are very exciting or appealing.
- this wedding crap is already starting to get to me, which is a terrible sign given how far there is still to go. Hopefully we can figure out a date this week (the new target month is July, it seems) but there's so much crap to do and blah blah blah whine whine whine.
Anyway. The good news is that despite being absolutely terrible yesterday, my weight dipped down a bit. Of course this means I'll be good today and will gain a lot tomorrow and then be depressed about it.
5 comments
weight
Mood: cheerful
Posted on 2009-01-20 12:38:00
Tags: weight politics
Words: 58
I've been kinda reluctant to post about my weight publicly, but in the spirit of shaming myself into shape, here are the graphs I look at each morning. (made in R!) Light jogging around the neighborhood has helped me feel more in shape...hopefully I can keep that up.
Also, I hear we have a new president or something?
6 comments
giving it another go
Mood: hopeful
Posted on 2009-01-06 11:30:00
Tags: essay weight
Words: 162
I am overweight. This displeases me.
I weighed myself every week through 2006 and 2007, and then my record started getting spotty in 2008 (to be fair, we bought a house and stuff). Keeping a log as to how well I was doing seems necessary to actually losing weight, but in the past it would just depress me because the fluctuations seemed random, independent of how "good" I thought I was that week. When I was in Weight Watchers in college I did lose weight, but counting points for every single meal and budgeting them and stuff made me pretty miserable.
So! New plan. Back to weekly weighings. At most one soda a day, and not at lunch. Exercise more, somehow, even though it's difficult when we don't get home until 7. Stop mindless snacking.
Unrelated: I'm no fan of Rice's tuition increases, but I'm glad they're at least raising the no-loan threshold and lowering the cap on loans in aid packages.
12 comments
what is the arity of this function??
Mood: confused
Posted on 2006-10-27 09:19:00
Tags: weight
Words: 112
All in all it hasn't been a great week, weightwise. I ate out Tuesday and Wednesday lunches (not particularly healthy) and had Indian food Thursday night instead of working out. I did a workout Tuesday evening and a short one Thursday evening. And cookie time (yay!) was yesterday.
So I thought I'd weigh myself this morning, just for kicks to see how good I needed to be this weekend. And I've lost more than a pound(!) since Tuesday morning.
This sounds good, but really it just weakens my perceived connection between how well I eat and how well I do for the week. Anyway, I'll enjoy dinner and a movie tonight more :-)
2 comments
Kojo Nnamdi is ruining my diet!
Mood: happy
Posted on 2006-10-26 13:19:00
Tags: weight politics
Words: 219
Seriously. His show is on the radio from 12-2, and I love listening to it (mostly because of his voice) so I went out and grabbed lunch yesterday instead of having soup like a good boy. I did resist the temptation today, but it was tough!
In case you didn't hear, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the state legislature must provide marriage or a marriage equivalent to gay couples within 180 days. Why this is especially good news:
- Because they allowed for the possibility of civil unions, I've read that this means the political impact will be less than it otherwise would.
- It was a 4-3 ruling...the 3 dissenting opinions were that they should extend full mariage rights to gays without kicking it back to the state legislature!
- It looks like the opponents of this decision are going to push for a state constitutional amendment in 2007, but by then the law will have been in effect for at least 6 months and the sky won't have fallen, so I doubt it will pass.
- Apparently the plaintiffs are Episcopal pastors - neat!
- New Jersey (unlike Massachusetts) doesn't require people getting married there to live in the state.
- New Jersey is like 3 hours away by car!!
Here's a neat map of laws and benefits in all 50 states
1 comment
one week at a time
Mood: proud
Posted on 2006-09-26 09:08:00
Tags: weight
Words: 165
So I've been weighing myself every week for quite a while now, and the results have been kinda meh (staying about the same, plus or minus noise). So this past week I've been decent about food (not great, but decent), and really good about working out and lifting weights. I was unhappy when I weighed in the middle of the week and had gained a pound, which seemed completely and totally unfair. Anyway, Tuesday morning is my official weighing time, so I did it this morning not knowing what to expect....
Lost 1.4 pounds! w00t!
So I'm going to do my best to keep exercising. It actually has kept me from being as tired as I probably should be, giving the amount of sleep we've been getting. And maybe I'll stop checking my weight during the week...when I thought I had gained a pound despite all I had done I was tempted to just give up.
Long way to go, but I can make progress!
4 comments
trippy game
Mood: focused
Posted on 2006-05-16 08:54:00
Tags: weight
Words: 74
So last night gerdemb brought the game We
Katamari (the sequel to Katamari Damacy)...whoa. I had heard that it was weird, but wow. Just watching it is pretty awesome :-) Watching that Katamari roll over small things, then fences, then children, then cars...good stuff!
So phase one of my weight plan is going well - lost weight this week, and I only need to lose .4 pounds to get down to a new low. Here's hoping!
8 comments
aww yeah
Music: Pink Floyd- "Hey you"
Posted on 2006-05-10 09:51:00
Tags: pictures weight links
Words: 128
So after the weekend where I ate lots of bad stuff, I was sure I was going to gain at least a pound. Flash forward to Tuesday morning....I step on the scale...plus .2 pounds! Awesome. So my goal this week is to lose weight, and next week to get below my low since I started in December (I'm only .8 pounds away, so this is very doable). Woohoo!
Some fun Daily Show videos: Hayden/Goss and "Oh, Really? bin Laden? Who?". Well done! Also a fun trailer for a "Pac-Man" movie made by Uwe Boll.
I put up the pictures from last weekend. Cute pictures of the nephews :-)
Fun information about US interstates. (thanks medryn)
Oh yeah - here's the Onion's preview of summer movies. (hint: they're not terribly excited)
0 comments
ruby scoping
Mood: confused
Posted on 2006-04-18 09:41:00
Tags: ruby weight programming
Words: 218
I weighed in this morning, and I'm at my lowest weight since starting to track it (oddly enough, despite eating many tasty cookies and candy on Sunday). Hooray!
On a completely separate note, I'm learning Ruby to use in my next project. It seems like a nice language, but I have a complaint already. Consider the following code:
[1,2,3].each {|e| print e, " " }
This prints out "1 2 3 " - the each operator iterates over the elements of the array, and the block that follows it ({|e| print e, " " }) operates on each one of them. So that's fine, and e is undefined after the block executes, as I would expect.
What I don't like is that the following code:
e = 10
[1,2,3].each {|e| print e, " " }
print e
prints out "1 2 3 3" - the e argument to the block ends up overwriting the e variable declared outside the block! This seems like a big violation of scoping - shouldn't the e inside the block be unrelated to the e outside the block? Can anyone (omega697, perhaps) explain this to me?
I mean, I can see why it might be useful (if you want to save the last value that the block executed on), but the penalty of possibly overwriting a variable outside the block's scope seems a bit much to handle...
10 comments
willpower over moodpower
Mood: tired
Location: 11500 N Mo-Pac Expy, Austin, TX 78731
Posted on 2006-04-04 08:58:00
Tags: google maps weight robolab challenge
Words: 372
So I went to bed last night tired, cranky and irritable. And I woke up tired, cranky and irritable. And then at some point (maybe in the shower) I decided that was crap. So now I'm tired, but not as cranky or irritable :-)
Google Maps just updated their API to version 2 (here's an upgrade guide from version 1). I upgraded my google map to use the new API. The only visible difference is now you can zoom in two levels closer on the satellite or hybrid views (as close as you can in Google Earth), to really give you that "whoa, that's creepy!" feeling. The irritating news is that now map coordinates have to be given in a GLatLng structure, which constructor takes the latitude and longitude in the opposite order as before. So now I have to spend a while rewriting the dental site to flip all those arguments - ugh! Why didn't they get this right in the first place?
Last week I gained a fair bit of weight for two weeks. This week, apparently, I lost that weight and .8 pounds more to boot. I'm both happy and suspicious of the scale.
Tom DeLay's resigning! Wow. Given that a former aide of his pleaded guilty to corruption a few days ago and said he'd cooperate with prosecutors, I'm guessing he's going to be found guilty (eventually), or at least he thinks he's going to be found guilty. This is good news for Texas!
This Thursday and Friday (and Saturday morning) is NI's annual technical conference, NITech. Kyle and I are doing the robolab challenge again (see LJ entries from last year's). Things are going pretty well (and we're both busy, so not gonna work on it as much) - we got programs going Sunday afternoon and last night we put them together and did some trial runs which went, on the whole, pretty well. (unfortunately that meant I had to miss game night hosted at my place...) The competition is Friday evening at 6 PM at NI, and it should last around an hour, if anyone's interested in coming :-)
Work is stressful. I need to do a better job at not getting stressed at work. Any suggestions would be welcomed.
0 comments
This backup was done by LJBackup.