Joe Average Gets Fit

I’ve read literally hundreds of books on success, goals, productivity, personal development, etc. One thing that I’ve noticed that appears consistently is the concept of measurement. If one wishes to achieve an objective, one must be able to determine whether progress is being made, or if you’re just keeping yourself busy.

Stephen Covey tells the famous story about a group of explorers in a thick equatorial jungle. They expend tremendous effort wielding machetes, blazing a path through the thick brush. They’re also making great time. After a while a man climbs a tree to see where they are. After he realizes their location, he cries out, “Wrong jungle!”

These explorers were making good time, alright. However, their effort was fruitless as they were measuring the wrong thing. They were concerned about how much distance they covered in a day, not how much closer to their destination they were.

Measurement also becomes important because:

• What is measured is affected.
• What is measured is improved.

My personal end result is not to weight less. Determining how much my cholesterol level can be improved by better diet and fitness is my purpose. However, weighing less is a key component. Without this, I cannot answer the larger question. Therefore, weighing less is my current focus.

If I want to weigh less, I have to be able to measure and monitor.

I’ve developed a strategy that I’ve shown to work for myself, but I’m aware that there’s a great deal of controversy over the parameters of measuring and monitoring weight. Being curious, I spent some time cruising the ‘Net. At first I was a little surprised by what I found, but only for a moment. It’s an old story, something that I’ve run across again and again. Lots of heat but little light from “experts”.

It’s readily apparent that we humans have no idea how often to weight ourselves for optimal tracking. The “research” out there is of little help, being contradictory. Much of the “research” appears to follow the typical trend for research, being a marketing ploy rather than actual science.

Some things that I have garnered:

Non Attachment

You have to understand that the number on the scale is just a number. It implies nothing about you as an individual, or whether one is succeeding or failing.

Useful Interval

This I understand from my work in scientific research. Choosing how often to measure depends on what you’re measuring. If you measure too often, you’re just picking up statistical noise. If you don’t measure often enough, you can’t see the trends in time to make course corrections

Useful Interpretation

You have to interpret the numbers in a useful way. For a while I measured myself several times a day just to get a feel for how a human’s weight varies during the day. It was fascinating. My overall pattern is that my weight is lowest in the morning, then rises during the day to peak out before going to bed. That’s not true every day, but it happened enough that I figured out (1) what kind of variation to expect during the day, (2) that it truly is important to measure under similar conditions (e.g. immediately before one gets in the shower in the morning), and (3) it desensitized me to the 1-2 pound swings that are possible.

Now that I understand this, I’ve been making note of my weight daily, stepping on the scale immediately before I step into the shower in the morning. I’ve learned to not be concerned about fluctuations, only trends.

After four days or so I can detect and correct any trends that are showing up consistently. I’ve noticed that I’ll slip into a new behavior pattern without thinking about it, and that messes things up. In that example that I wrote about, I started drinking a lot more fruit juice, which is very rich in nutrients. I like fruit juices. However, it started throwing my journey out of whack. If I weren’t measuring, I couldn’t have detected something was out of kilter.

Enjoy

I have a tendency to focus on a particular thing and hammer at it until it’s done. This can be a great gift or a great curse, depending on whether I harness this natural trait of mine for good or ill. Practicing a daily gratitude recitation helps me keep focused on the bigger picture by preventing me from getting caught in tunnel vision.

Anyhow, these are things that I’ve been pondering for some days. I hope that everybody will experiment and discover their own natural rhythm.

Status: 45 pounds (20 kg) lighter.