Welcome to Year Three
This week in lifestyle blogging
Today marks the start of the third year of my ongoing project to lose some weight and keep it off. The main mechanism for which is the graph above, which displays data from a daily weight check (blue line) and a moving seven-day average of same (red points). There’s enough variation in scales that I don’t bother checking when I’m traveling, thus all the gaps (usually followed by an upward jump, because I tend to eat more and exercise less when traveling…).
This was an outgrowth of the pandemic period, which enforced a fairly sedentary lifestyle for a year plus. I did start biking again, but other than that pretty much never left the immediate area of our house, and ended up doing a lot of snacking out of boredom. This led to a pretty noticeable decline in general fitness by the late summer of 2021, and I decided I needed to do something about it.
There isn’t anything all that clever involved in this; just the boring old staple of “eat less and exercise more.” I try to avoid keeping snacks that I like around the house (we have a lot of things that Kate and the kids like more than I do), and try to exert a little portion control at mealtimes. I also try to get some moderately intense exercise as often as possible; pick-up hoops if possible, mostly biking aside from that (I have a bunch of routes mapped out that are 10-ish miles each); in the winter, I cross-country ski as much as I can manage, and ride the exercise bike in the basement when the weather doesn’t cooperate.
The big steep decline through late 2021 and most of 2022 mostly coincides with my sabbatical year, when I wasn’t teaching or doing regular meetings on campus, so it was a whole lot easier to keep up the exercise component. Since the start of 2023, it’s been more of a maintenance phase— I’ve generally been busy at work and with kid activities in ways that aren’t conducive to exercising quite as much as I did when I was away from campus. And being in and around my campus office so much also brings me in range of a lot more of the free-food events that are a staple of collegiate life. I’ve never quite shaken the grad-student reflex to load up at these.
(The big spike up in late 2022 is when Kate and I went on a luxury cruise, followed by the Christmas holiday. I never entirely recovered from that…)
To be totally honest, a lot of the time, this kind of sucks. The “eat less” part of the boring formulation has a lot more impact than the “exercise more” part— if you do the math, it’s really easy to ingest calories at a level that it’s nearly impossible to exercise away while holding down a desk job. I really enjoy food and beer, and it’s difficult to keep my intake down. This is particularly bad right after a trip out of town— the first day or two home after 3-4 days of every meal being in a restaurant just suuuuck.
In the bigger picture, though, it’s worth the effort. I feel a whole lot better than I did in the summer of 2021, even on days when I’m sore from overdoing the exercise thing (yesterday’s bike ride got stretched out to 24 miles for reasons that are my own stupid fault, and my legs really hurt after that…) I’m moving better on the basketball court, I’m not completely gassed when I have to climb a couple flights of stairs, I’m less bothered by hot weather, etc. I would sort of like to lose a little more— getting under 260 lbs would be nice— but doing that while keeping up with work and family would probably require a level of fussy diet tracking and menu planning that I don’t want to deal with.
Even just maintaining the new status quo is a better place than before I started this, though. Which is why I keep up the daily weigh-ins, and keep adding data points to the graph as we enter year three of this slow-motion project.
I try to keep personal humblebragging to a minimum here, which is part of why I’m burying this in a holiday weekend. Posting occasionally about it is a sort of accountability mechanism, though, so you end up with this. If for some weird reason you’d like to sit through several months of other stuff to see the next update, here’s a button:
And here’s another if for some weird reason you feel so moved:
Great work in losing that weight. Great stats too.