As it happens, I've recently decided to get "serious" about exercise and about tracking my weight. In particular, I decided to start swimming laps, which is something I haven't done seriously since high school. My routine is 3-4 days/week I'll swim a half hour (900-1000m), one day I'll play squash, and one day I'll go for a 4 mile run. So, how successful has this been?



In short, not very much, but at least it's going in the proper direction. You'll see the dots get denser around the end of August. That's after my daughter started kindergarten, and I now walk her to school every morning and then continue walking to the pool.

Why so little progress? Probably because I'm now far hungrier than I was beforehand.

The last time I got this level of seriousness about exercise was maybe twelve years ago, when I first started my job in Houston, and decided to take up a training program toward running a marathon. In the space of six months, I dropped from maybe 180 pounds to 147 pounds, at which point I looked like a twig, people thought I was unhealthy, and I might add, I was eating staggering volumes of food.

The injury level from all that running was simply unsustainable, so I backed off and, unsurprisingly, gained weight slowly but surely, maybe only five pounds per year, but it adds up. This is in no small part why I decided to make swimming be the backbone of my sorry-ass attempts at being seriously athletic again. It takes some serious talent to injure yourself in a pool. (As the air temperature drops into the winter, it will also take some serious force of will to continue swimming in the outdoor pool I've been using.)

I'm hoping that my new program will do the job. I suppose I could make adjustments on the eating end, but the thought of doing something drastic like cutting carbs gives me the chills. As it is, while I was running, I dropped sugary and caffeinated drinks altogether. I mostly now drink water, with maybe one beer a month. As such, the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.

Incidentally, if you try to fit a line to the blur of points starting in late August, it looks like I could be losing somewhere between half a pound and one pound per week, but I won't consider it to be "real" until I break 190 pounds. Similarly, these point clouds do a nice job of explaining how useless scales are at measuring your weight. I've done my best to be very controlled in when and how I weigh myself (in the morning, after my bathroom routine). I mostly put the variation down to how well or poorly hydrated I might be at the time.