For a little under a month now, I've made a conscience decision to change my habits so that I can loose some weight. I've been wanting to do this for some time now but the real kicker was when I found out that I was 70 - 80 pounds over my "ideal" weight. So I decided to attack this scientificly and sensibly. I don't want to rely on some radical diet change that I know I never will be able to keep up for an extended period of time. So here is what I am doing:
- Excercising more (or more precisely start exercising)
- Eating smaller portions (of generally healther food)
- Drinking tons more water
- Being scientific about recording all my exercising and taking weight measurements
- Telling everyone that I am doing this so I have a lot of peer pressure if I start to slack off the program (this blog entry is part of this item)
Recording the exercises has really made it more like a habit and it sets an expectation in my mind that I need to fill out another line in the spreadsheet. Also, as a means to induce peer pressure I wanted everyone to be able to see an automaticly generated chart of my progreess. It was a good excuse to practice my python skills. Here is a graph of my current weight over the past month (check back as this updates each day):
To produce this chart, I am using my seperate support blog to enter my daily weight into a new entry. I have a movable type index template that writes out this data as a csv file. Then i wrote this python program to produce the chart. I am using the ChartDirector to produce the chart. Its not open source but it works well and the documentation is incredible. Very clear and filled with tons of examples. I wanted to use the open PyChart but it doesn't seem to work on a headless server.
Next on my list of exercising support software is to learn more about Tkinter so that I can create a custom gui for entering my weight measurement easier. I've explored the MT XML-RPC API already and written a small class to abstract it. It was quite easy. Now its just a matter of finding the the time to read the tkinter docs.
| Permalink | 
Comments (8)
Now you're going to go and make me feel guilty for being over my ideal weight, aren't you.
# Posted by Will | July 24, 2004 2:19 PM
Impressive.
# Posted by Kevin Hill | July 24, 2004 2:19 PM
hey . . . I wanna loose weight for the summer!!!!!!
# Posted by Alex | July 24, 2004 2:19 PM
I am a backslider of many "diets", I have come to the conclusion that I will have to make life changes (healthy eating and excercise)to lose and keep off the weight I have gained. I am looking for a chart like yours that I can use for my own records. anything for a beginner. Thanks for putting your info out as inspiration.
# Posted by theresa | January 5, 2005 8:59 AM
Theresa,
I haven't done anything that I would probably translate well to a "beginner" user, but the Hacker's Diet goes through a lot of details on how you should log your weight using either Excel or paper and pencil. That might be right up your alley.
# Posted by Mark Mascolino | January 5, 2005 9:37 AM
Hey Mark, how are you doing now?
# Posted by Jessica | January 1, 2006 6:30 PM
Hi Jessica, as of today I am 192.6 and you can keep track of my weight at my weight loss page.
# Posted by Mark Mascolino | January 1, 2006 11:21 PM
Hi Mark,
I like your methodical approach and it's great to let everyone know what you are doing, as it keeps the pressure on to finish what you started. Well done.
Darrell.
# Posted by Darrell | December 7, 2007 11:11 AM