Alrighty, let’s get this “Week 1” (week 115 since restarting in 2019) started!
Explaining the Infographic
First off, I have made the Infographic more complicated than simple, but anyone reading this who’s seen it in the past should recognize it. With that said, I’m going to go through things in order so we can figure out what’s going on.
Food: The first swim lane is how I did on food. I used to have the target calories in the middle of the axis vertically, and then do some arbitrary height thing for if I went over or under. Since I want to be able to flip through things and see my madd progress which will have different calorie goals, I decided I’m going to use an absolute axis that goes between my target minimum when I’m cutting at ≈170 lbs (≈1400 cal), and my target maximum when I’m bulking at ≈190 lbs (≈2200 cal), plus *cough* room to grow. So, the scale is real, and the +3% of target is what was recorded. The shaded/dashed area, however, shows what I really ate and it gives the reaction emoji for that. Sigh. Moving over is the pie chart I’ve used since I first started to do these in December 2019, showing the macros consumed. Moving over and we have the actual target ranges for the macros (so, the red shaded region is goal for fat, yellow for carbs, and blue for protein, where the more solid the color is the maximum (fat/carbs) or minimum (protein)). The circles on it indicate where I landed this week, so it was pretty good for recorded macros. And, we get a smiley face emoji for how I did on recorded food.
Exercise: Moving down a swim lane and we have exercise. I’ve added a scale bar which is a vertical indicator of total calories burned through exercise during the week. It slides between 0 and 4000 calories, and since the beginning of 2019, I have only surpassed 4000 calories in a week once (4185 cal). I came close a second time at 3776 cal. So, I’m not worried I’ll go above it, but I’ll cross that bridge if I come to it. The colored oval is where I laded this week, and the color will shift as I go higher or lower; the target is ≥1875 cal since that is the calories needed for half a pound of fat. Moving over and we have all the exercises I think I might ever do in word and emoji form. Anything with a 🚫 indicates I didn’t do it this week, though it’s faded because I got depressed seeing a bunch of red every week. Anything else has a clock where the time spent doing that activity is rounded ≈up to the nearest half-hour. Next to each clock is how many calories burned, total, in that activity during the week, rounded to the nearest 10. Next over is how many steps I took, rounded to the nearest 100. Next over from that and we have any badges gotten from my Apple Watch. As you can see this week, I’m trying much harder not to cheat. Finally, we have the emoji reaction to exercise for the week.
Sleep: Sleep is important to any fitness goals since your body needs time to recover. The target I have is 8 hrs/night, and anything above that is good. The scale isn’t arbitrary, and there’s a marker for how much sleep I got each night of the week, from Sunday on the left through Saturday on the right. Anything >9 is indicated by an arrow up, anything <7 is indicated by an arrow down. Anything ≥8 is green, <8 is red. The rest of the swim lane is empty save for the final emoji reaction.
Measurements: This is at the bottom because it’s the “bottom-line” — everything else is great in theory, but what really tells me if what I’m doing is successful is whether the weight goes down and the bodyfat goes down. The graph is a relative scale for the week, where the average weight for the week is in the center (vertically), and each circle represents a scaled measurement, Sunday through Saturday. The down arrow next to it indicates the goal is to be losing weight, and the note at the bottom is how much weight I’ve lost since I last (re-)started; in this case, that’s just the max-min for this week. In subsequent weeks there will be a faded bar that indicates the average weight for the previous week so we can see if I’ve gone up or down on average. The piechart next to it is my bodyfat, where my starting point several months ago was a whopping 30.0%. I’ve indicated my target goal, and I’ve indicated my lowest ever recorded (about 15.5%). The green tiny sliver indicates how much I’ve lost so far, with the green arrow indicating the goal is to keep moving that green and filling in the yellow with green. Last up is the emoji reaction which, I guess so long as my weight went sorta down this week, is a positive. In subsequent weeks, it’ll be based on whether my measurements went down week-over-week.
Footer: Finally, we have two items in the footer. First is what my goal is, which right now (and seems like in perpetuity) is to cut, as in lose fat. Next are my points earned for the week. I’ve explained points a couple times on the blog, so suffice to say for now, there are numerous things I want to try to do during the week, or not do. Like, I want to get my 8 hrs of sleep. But I don’t want to cheat on food for the day. Some things I want to have done more than others (like make sure I take my bodyfat measurements once is more important than not taking a nap). I assign positive and negative points for doing or not doing things each day, and then the sum is what you see. The total score can be between –100 and +100, where the goal is +100 (which I’ve never achieved). The idea came from the John Stone Fitness Forums where they had a “100 Point Challenge” every month, where you set your own goals to do every day, and each time you slipped up, you subtracted 1 point. Whomever had the most points at the end, won. I adapted that to this, with my own weighting scheme, and weekly check rather than monthly. So, this indicates that there is certainly room for improvement, and is sort of a way to distill down this entire chart to one metric. For instance, if I do all the exercise in the world, but I over-eat, I’ll still only be at around +50 points for the week.
How’d I Do This Week?
Now that you’re an expert in my infographic, we can go through and see how I did.
Food: I’ve talked about this a lot in the daily entries, but in short, I did “well” for what I recorded, but then I did crappily when you factor in what I didn’t record. Excuses aside, the excuse was some stress with the boyfriend coming down with COVID-19. When I went to the store on Saturday, and then again on Tuesday, I bought a pint of ice cream. Each time. And ate them in one day. Those alone account for 60% of the over-eating. The rest comes from bites and nibbles of chocolate, some chana masala that I need to get rid of, and gummi bears. There is significant room for improvement here. However, this is the first week in literally a year (week of June 27, 2021) where I met my macros to within 1.5%. Again, if you ignore the cheating. Which I am in order to look for a silver lining here.
Exercise: For a “Week 1,” I did pretty well with exercise. I’ve pretty much never done core exercises nor weights in a Week 1 restart, and even my major April 2020 restart when I started this blog only saw me do about 700 calories in exercise. I have to go back to my first modern restart in January 2019 to have done more – 2390 cal – for the first week. So, I’m going to call it a success. It also took a lot of willpower to not cheat on my Watch rings, but … I didn’t. I did, however, get my June 2022 challenge, so that was nice. For those who don’t have an Watch, the AI gives you some arbitrary challenge for filling rings, or burning X calories per month, or X minutes of exercise, or whatever based on how you’ve done the last few months. So, June was to burn about 775 cal/day, on average, or more. The black 7/7 badge below it is awarded for doing at least 7 recorded workouts of ≥5 minutes during the week, which I almost always get. The one below that that’s blue/white and 7/7 is meeting my stand goal every day during the week, which means I walked around at least for 1 minute during at least twelve one-hour periods. I have gotten that one every week I’ve owned the watch except the first and second when I didn’t really know about it and led a field trip to Yellowstone that included driving in the car for 12 hours.
Sleep: Decent. I was a lot more tired than I should’ve been, but I’ll chalk it up to doing more and more intense exercise than the last several weeks.
Measurements: First four days were good on weight, and then suddenly I had that pint of ice cream and – gosh golly gee – shockingly my weight went up. Proving yet again that if I over-eat, I gain weight. That said, I am actually on track as of today. For bodyfat, I was slightly lower than I expected, but I also decided to make my mental math easier for the piechart in Illustrator and just leave it at a starting point of 30.0% from before. So, that’s how I’ve “improved” even though it’s just Week 1.
Points: I’ve certainly done worse. The primary areas that cost me points this week were cheating on food (could’ve gotten +18) and exercise (exercise totaled –17.75 pts instead of +34 pts). Despite doing 1413 calories in exercise this week, and exercising on five different days, my actual goal is to do cardio for ≥40 minutes at least five times a week (only did ≥40 minutes once), do weight lifting for ≥30 minutes at least three times a week, and do core exercises for ≥15 minutes every day. So, lots of room for improvement.
Looking Ahead
With the week behind me, I can look ahead and see what challenges and opportunities face me.
One Week: In the coming week, my primary concern with food is that it’s the Fourth of July. We’re not doing anything with other people (still concerned about transmitting COVID), but for the last few years I’ve made some mini fruit tarts, and I’m doing that again this year. I’ve factored into the meal plan eating parts of the tarts and giving some away, but this is an area of concern about cheating. I’m also a tiny bit concerned about the boyfriend’s recovery being a bit slower and him not eating the food I’ve planned out. That will mainly require me moving things on down into the future since I’ll need to eat more left-overs, but the concern there is that I’ve paired lower-carb dinners with the tart-eating and with doughnuts on Friday, assuming I do go into the office this coming Friday. Beyond that, my other concern is weather with exercise: No day is going to peak below 85°, and so I need to be smart about what exercise I do when, not leaving things to mid-day when it’s super-hot, and playing with the orientations of some fans in the basement.
Further Ahead: I’m optimistic (I always say that …) that “this will the time I really do it!” I don’t have any planned travel now until mid-August, though I am running a conference the second week of August and then travel is immediately after that. If I can get the cheating under control and spend an average of just an hour a day exercising (really, that’s all it is to meet my above-stated goals), then the weight – and fat – should slop off. It’s not hard, it’s just hard work. I’m also hoping I can get those under control and see fairly decent progress these first few weeks, since that will significantly help with the motivation. My last record-low weight was October 2020 at 203.8 lbs with a bodyfat of 24.0%. There’s a chance I could reasonably get to that again for this October, with the mid-October target of 23.0% bodyfat based on reasonable estimated losses. But, there are two trips between now and then. We’ll see …
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