Dead Letters

Screenshot of my fourth month’s progress using Weightbot (for the iPhone & iPod touch).

Yikes, my highest Month High and my highest Month Low to date. Though, I do find it encouraging that from the 18th on until the end of the month my weight remained moderately consistent. Before I began this project I never tracked my weight as regularly as I am now, but when I did I noticed a pretty even progression. I never tracked as much fluctuation as I have in the past few months. I’m curious to see how next month will look like.

Month High: 153.4 lbs.
Month Low: 148.6 lbs.

Screenshot of my third month’s progress using Weightbot (for the iPhone & iPod touch).

I knew this little project would pay off eventually.

I love visualization (as a general rule), love it, love it, love it. But in the context of this post I’m really talking about data visualization. And I suppose my fondness for it all boils down to perspective, visualizing data so as to approach it in another way and broaden our understanding of it. It’s like any art form really, it’s taking the known and illuminating it in such a way that it becomes new. And in this instance it totally is, because I’ve never had this information collected to begin with. So I’ve never really seen any of these patterns before.

The first thing I’m noticing is that I’m gaining weight from month to month (an average of 1.7 lbs.), which is interesting because you could infer that I gain weight from year to year. From what I know, that’s not the case. Then again, I’ve never charted these numbers before so I can’t be certain of that. So my body either balances itself out every year or I gain a negligible amount of weight that goes by unnoticed.

I also see, based from the average slope of my weight gain/loss, that I maintain my weight midway through the month and then gain weight during the latter half. And these periods of time are juxtaposed between consistency and irregularity. The first half of these past three months are marked by periods of leveling, while the latter half of each month spikes erratically. And I don’t know why that is, but I’m enjoying theorizing about it and the patterns themselves.

Unfortunately, when I start meditating on the patterns I become disheartened by the fact that I don’t have as large a data set as I could have, had I started tracking my weight much earlier. Many of the theories floating around inside my head are based on time. But as time progresses, things tend to change and so I wonder as I get older and my body begins to change whether or not I’ve shifted into a new pattern without realizing it. It’s most certainly the case, and it’s nothing I can change since I don’t have dominion over space-time, but that doesn’t stop me from agonizing over what can’t be known, but could have been known. I will wonder how things have changed. And yet I know I should maintain focus on the excitement of seeing how things will change. So that is what I will do.

Maintaining. Focusing. Changing.

Month High: 153.0 lbs.
Month Low: 148.0 lbs.

Screenshot of my second month’s progress using Weightbot (for the iPhone & iPod touch).

It looks as though I’ve been steadily gaining weight, however slightly. It seems a bit odd given that it’s Summer, you’d think I would’ve sweated away to nothing. I’m guessing it has to do with stepping up my exercise routine, and by “stepping up” I mean to say even getting around to exercising at all. When I got sick at the turn of the new year I totally abandoned my workout routine. It wasn’t until last month that I made a conscious effort to pick up where I left off.

Lately a lot of things (more than usual) have been floating around in my head, mostly about the way things should be… and I know I should be living healthier, in every facet of my life: physically, mentally and spiritually. And since I’ve always had a pretty good handle on my physical body/being I thought wresting control in that area would be pretty easy. And it has been, I’ve fallen back into the routine of exercising quite easily. That said, I can’t truly say I’m all that concerned with exercise in and of itself. Even when I wasn’t exercising, I kind of was because I never stopped walking. But walking to me is almost like breathing, it’s just something I have to do, and in the doing don’t even think about. It’s never had anything to do with the act of maintaining physical health, it’s been about other things, and none of them involve challenging myself. There’s a thread here I could follow, but doing so would lead me astray and violate my notions of what a tumblelog should be. Should be.

Real exercise to me means sweating, or rather, pushing yourself; challenging yourself. I could always work up a sweat during one of my long walks, but again, I never found them challenging. Pushing myself is sort of what I’m chasing. That, along with maintaining a routine, and by extension becoming accustomed to committing to committing. There’s another one of those loose threads again.

All of this has been a roundabout way of saying that I think I gained some muscle in August, which would account for the slight weight gain. It’s probably imperceptible to most people, but I can see the way my body’s changed over the past month and it has me pretty jazzed. But probably not for the reasons most would think. There’s that first thread again, and a third, but again, I’ll skip over them for now.

Month High: 150.6 lbs.
Month Low: 146.8 lbs.

Screenshot of my first month’s progress using Weightbot (for the iPhone & iPod touch).

I’m not particularly concerned with my weight, but I had to download Weightbot when my brother demoed it for me some months back on his iPhone. I was instantly smitten by its clever user interface and gorgeous design. I suppose the app doesn’t do all that much, but what it does do looks beautiful.

It takes full advantage of my iPod touch’s motion-sensing capabilities by displaying a chart of various statistical information when tilted to the left, and when tilted to the right it displays a graph of my progress which, when double-tapped, can cycle through views of the week, month or year. All in all it’s a pretty snazzy app for a design geek and numbers nerd like me.

Again, I don’t know how practical my purchase was given that I don’t pay too much attention to my weight, at least as far as numbers are concerned, but now that I have charts and graphs to pore over, I’ve been kicking around this idea that just might make Weightbot a worthwhile buy. Perhaps I’ll elaborate on that idea in a future post.

So, I finally purchased Weightbot on July 5th and began tracking my weight on July 3rd at 146.8 lbs. And I ended my first month on August 3rd at 146.8 lbs. I ended just where I began. How come I end up where I started?

Month High: 149.8 lbs.
Month Low: 145.6 lbs.

Oh, by the way, I don’t necessarily have a “goal” in mind, but I felt I needed to have one for the sake of having one, so I chose a Goddess Number (1 + 4 + 4 = 9). Also, I was curious as to what happens when a goal is reached in the app. Will there be an animation of some sort? Will a tune be played? Will I be disappointed? We’ll just have to wait and see.