Health Log Experiment Update

Here are the results of my health log experiment.  As I posted here, on January 28 I started keeping track daily of some basic health items such as my minutes of vigorous exercise, my minutes of low impact exercise, the number of times I ate sweets, when I went to bed, and my weight.

Scientifically speaking, this was a lousy experiment.

There wasn't a control group.  And I was trying to measure too many things at the same time.

But I learned some things anyway.

First, here is an overview of how I did.  Because my knees started acting up, I am just going to analyze the first 63 days here.  Over those nine weeks, I did at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on 40 of those days, giving me a 63% in that category.  (Vigorous exercise is something that gets me panting, sweating, and having an elevated heart rate, usually a dance workout or P90x with my husband.)  Somewhat surprisingly, my low impact exercise only reached the 20 minute minimum on 33 of the 63 days, giving me a 52% success rate.  On some days when I didn't do of vigorous exercise, like Sunday, I did to the low impact exercise (mostly walking) because my husband and I almost always walk to church, which is a mile one-way and adds up to about 40 minutes of walking.  Also, many days I did much more than 20 minutes.  In fact, if I went to weekday Mass, and then went walking with mom, I would end up with a total of at least an hour for that day, which was not unusual on my Tuesdays off.

Totals --
vigorous exercise: 21.6 hours
low impact exercise: 20.8 hours

What about sweets?  I had no sweets at all on 41 of the 63 days, making it, by one day, my most successful category.

How successful was I in regard to weight loss?  After all, one of my goals was to be more comfortable in my blue jeans.  When I started out, my weight was bouncing between 113 and 114 pounds.  After the nine weeks, it was hanging out around 111 pounds, with an occasional movement up to 112 and down to my all-time lowest of 109.6.  However, weight became less important as I got more toned, and my clothes fit better, even at 112 pounds, then they did before because I had more muscle and less flab.

(Now before you start commenting that a woman in her 30s should not weigh so little, keep in mind that at 5 feet, 1 inches tall, I am basically child-sized, and I have a very light bone structure.  When I got married about 14 years ago, I weighed around 106 pounds, so it's not like I'm trying to get back to my high school weight or anything unreasonable like that!)

What did I learn?

• The data doesn't lie, but my perceptions do.  I would have sworn that I did much more vigorous exercised, and that I really fell down in the eating sweets department.  Generally, though, we really overestimate how healthy we are behaving if we don't keep track.  At least, I do.
• I was assuming that giving up something particularly toothsome should lead to a corresponding drop in weight.  This is actually kind of funny.  ("But I didn't eat the French silk pie!  I should drop 3 pounds because I really wanted that French silk pie.  I don't see why the scale is treating this the same way as need not eating unappetizing oatmeal raisin cookies.")
• My body is not a vending machine.  It's not -- put healthy activity in, get weight-loss out.  The scale moves in mysterious ways, that seemed to have nothing to do with what I am eating (or not eating) and whether or not I am exercising.  This is discouraging, but it is why persistence matters.  If you want to get healthier, you have to persevere even through thoughts like these: "I have been so good, and I'm gaining weight anyway... This isn't fair!"
• Supposedly, when you are exercising vigorously and building muscle, you'll actually temporarily gain weight because your muscles retain water during this process.  I don't know if that is the reason, but certainly I found that my weight increased a little bit when I did stuff like push-ups and weightlifting.  However, that little gain tended to precede more significant drops.
• I'm not getting as much sleep as I thought I was getting.
• Eating gluten does not seem to affect my weight.
• It can take up to a month and a half of exercising almost daily and cutting back significantly on sugar before you see results.
• Living in a world where a push of a button or a click of the mouse instantly gets me what I want makes me inpatient.  I expect instant results.  The body does not work that way.
• Exercising outside seemed to be more effective.  (Of course, it hasn't been nice outside very long, so the data is scanty.)
• My body is way too complicated for an experiment like this to tell me what I wanted it to tell me.
• Once you make some significant strides towards getting into shape, your body is pretty forgiving of eating sugar or taking a break from exercising.

What seems to have helped the most, actually, is something I didn't keep track of -- portion control.  Towards the end of the experiment, I tried to start eating more reasonable portion.  I wanted to leave the table feeling just barely satisfied, not stuffed.  Supposedly, your stomach is the size of a fist and a half.  (Your fist.  Not André the Giants's fist.)  I tried not to eat more than that amount, reminding myself that in a couple of hours I would have a snack of some fruit or yogurt or something.

Part the reason I know that portion control is more significant than I thought, is that when my knees started bothering me I decided it was a useful time to be my own control group.  About two weeks ago, I stopped doing any vigorous exercise and told myself I could eat whatever I liked.  Since I also liked being able to select more than one pair of jeans from my closet, I kept walking and I kept up the portion control.  I haven't gained the weight back.  I've gained a little bit of inches, but not back to where I was.


This summer, once my knees feel better, I'm going to take advantage of my teacher free time to really up the exercise.  Plus I'm going to cut sugar completely.  (Well, I'll try.)  Then in the fall, I'm going to resume eating sugar only if my weight is below 111.  Then I won't "waste" calories on sugary stuff that isn't that good, like store-bought birthday cake.

Bottom line: I am going to continue keeping track.  Every body is different just like everybody is different, so I would suggest if you're curious, that you should do the same thing.  But if you weigh yourself daily, you must not freak out by how much your weight fluctuates.  To fluctuates much more often and much more mysteriously then you might expect, and that is just part of being a complex creature.  If you're measuring inches, I would do that even less frequently.  Maybe once every two weeks.

I think this experiment has motivated me to pay closer attention to my health.  It also has me thinking about health as more of a long-term project and less of an item I can check off of my to-do list.  Both are both good things.