Alisa discussion

Unbounded
1

This thread is a continuation of Curiosity – Alisa Discussion.

I’ll kick off the continuation thread with an update on my weight loss project, which I started on 2021-01-16. The goal was, and is, to lower my BMI from 29.5 to 28. However, I actually gained weight. My BMI got as high as 30 on 2021-05-20. When I weighed myself yesterday, my BMI was 29.64.

The good news is that I have gotten pretty good at tracking my calories in and my calories burned. Ever since 2021-03-01, I’ve been tracking my calorie intake with an app and my calories burned with my apple watch. Usually the data I enter comes from nutrition labels and a scale. Sometimes, I estimate the data for things I ate that I don’t have nutrition info for or that I didn’t weigh.

On 2021-04-26, I wrote that using 1850/day as my basal metabolism makes my predicted weight[1] in the morning when I wake up closely match my actual weight. So far that’s held mostly true, though it looks like 1865/day may be a closer match.

My current weight loss plan, which I’ve been trying since 2021-05-30, is to try to eat and exercise each day so that at least one of the following is true:

  • PredictedWeight[this morning] < PredictedWeight[yesterday morning]
  • PredictedWeight[tomorrow morning] < PredictedWeight[yesterday morning]

This plan lets me go over my calories for one day as long as I make it up the next day. I like using my predicted weight instead of my actual weight for this because my predicted weight has less variation due to non-energy-factors such as water retention or going to the bathroom.

Since I started on this plan 9 days ago, my predicted weight has gone down by ~0.5 kg. (My actual weight went down by ~1 kg, but I think that’s just normal variance.) I plan to see how well this plan is working over the next month or so, including looking at how my actual weight changes.

  1. predicted weight = starting weight + (total calories in – total calories burned)/3500 ↩︎

2

Does your past data match your past results? In other words, does your calorie counting show that you ate enough to gain the weight that you did?

3

In general, yes. Near the beginning of June, my formula over-estimated my weight by as much as 1.5 kg compared to what I actually weighed on the scale. I think the discrepancy depends in part on what days I weigh myself, how much I ate the day before, and what I ate recently. I’ve heard that eating lots of carbs can increase water retention which increases weight temporarily.

As of today, the prediction, which is based on my actual weight on March 1 followed by pure dead reckoning (using calories in vs calories out with a basal metabolism of 1865 kcal/day) from there, is within 0.1 kg of my actual weight.