It’s been almost four years since I started actively controlling my weight. I had gained a significant amount of weight during my Master’s studies, primarily due to the ease of having a Steers burger for lunch every day when you’re right across from Steers in your lab. I estimate that my peak weight was about 100 kg, but my first proper measurement is 95 km. I am 1.87 m tall and these two stats put me in the “overweight” category, on the bad end of the histogram.
So, I started calorie restriction, as documented in my previous post on data gathering. I lost a lot of weight in a pretty short amount of time and have kept the weight off. A little later the same year (2008) I also started running. When I tell people I run, many nod sagely and say “ah – so that’s how you lost your weight”. I have good data that belie this idea, and I have now taken the time to graph the stuff together. Here is my weight (smoothed with an exponential moving average filter) and my weekly running distance. I have been tracking my running with a GPS enabled device since the very first walks around the block.
It is clear from this graph that the majority of my weight loss happened before I started running. I feel that this is probably why I could run at all. I cannot imagine running with a 20 kg weight strapped to my back now! It is also pretty clear that there is no significant correlation between my running distance and my weight. Put a different way, I control my weight by varying the amount I eat, not by varying the amount I run. I’ve recently started tracking the calories I eat again – hopefully I can produce a graph next year that shows that my food intake is my dominant handle on my weight.