So my first foray into my own data set and “analyzation” was fun. Challenging, lots of googling, but overall fun… which I think is a good thing if I want to make this more than just a hobby…
What I realized though, is that my first blog post and attempt here didn’t do exactly what I wanted. So I played around with the code, made some more plots… and honestly have a take away from what I found.
So with that, I will present two updated plots. my findings and then move on to another data set… may circle back to this. May revisit in a year… may try to add more data to this i.e step count from my iPhone. only time will tell.
Without further ado – in the last post, I presented the graphs as seen below. Weight by year as a scatter colored by year. Weight by year as a line graph. and individual years by weight colored by year. To see this in more detail click here.
Again, maybe this is not interesting to you, but it was to me! A computer, through inputting code, spit out these plots – that is just amazing to me. Normally I would use Excel, which is a great resource and tool, but can only go so far. At some point I must take the training wheels off and dive in – even if Excel would have been easier with less headache … all in the name of learning.
So again, some pretty clear trends and I could see that hey… in general as the year progresses I gain weight. But the last plot, and to me most telling plot was cluttered. So I wanted to separate those out and here is the result:
What I immediately see is that the total weight lost in 2016 was pretty significant. Which had a slight rebound in 2017 but other than that, weight has been pretty consistent from year to year. (albeit a slight YoY increase is evident) Of course on a monthly basis there are some ups and down – which I can attribute to diet, workout regime (can you say POWERLIFTING), and even mood/time of year/season of life. Would be interesting to plot major life events – one day. But I can tell you that it does have an effect – for example pre wedding the trend is down…. post wedding the trend points up. (who wouldn’t want to look good for their wedding!)
So the point of all that is … to me this visual is more telling and also makes me realize that overall… the ups and downs have not been that drastic…
But what I really wanted to do was see how many times I was weighing myself each year/month and see if that determined anything. So I set out to create a histogram for each year by month… and what I quickly found is that in general, the more i checked and RECORDED my weight – the more accountable I was, and likely more adherent to eating well – since 2016 I have always worked out… but depending on the year/season it may have meant Powerlifting which is not exactly a weight loss sport, unless trying to make weight… and then yes it is… which is miserable! ha – just ask Hailey… and honestly that was only 3 times – which id hardly say was a large part of my training. But I digress.
So as you can see below, the amount of weight measurements was quite significant in 2016 and not surprising it was the year I lost most weight. So I could probably correlate overall weight loss with # of measurements in that year. And guessing it would line up… is that causation or correlation, I would say correlation… but that said I think it is very true that just the act of weighing can keep you adherent and accountable, and on track… so maybe just that simple act can give our subconsciousness the hint to eat a little less that day?
I can also see that I record more at the start and end of a year – with the middle being less so… this also seems to correspond to when weight goes down or up…
So with that – I am going to put this data set “away” for now and come back to in at a later date!