{"id":59,"date":"2012-05-15T06:18:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-15T06:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/2012\/05\/15\/you-cannot-say-my-running-caused-my-weight-loss\/"},"modified":"2012-05-15T06:18:00","modified_gmt":"2012-05-15T06:18:00","slug":"you-cannot-say-my-running-caused-my-weight-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/2012\/05\/you-cannot-say-my-running-caused-my-weight-loss\/","title":{"rendered":"You cannot say my running caused my weight loss"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>, on the bad end of the histogram.<\/p>\n

So, I started calorie restriction, as documented in my previous post<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\n<\/a><\/div>\n

 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[114,152,189],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-analysis","tag-health","tag-running"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandrock.co.za\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}