This page gathers up my posts related to Health and Fitness. This chart is a snapshot of my status as of August 21st 2020, along with some target ranges.
Measurement
21 August 2020
Healthy Range
HbA1C
7.2
< 7 (< 5.6)
Fasting Glucose
7.7
< 7
Blood Pressure
121/82
< 130/80
Triglycerides
7.3
< 2 mmol/L
Cholesterol
3.1
< 5.2 mmol/L
HDL
0.6
> .9 mmol/L
LDL
Cannot calculate
< 3.5 mmol/L
Weight
253 lb
190 lb (227 overweight)
Chest
44″
Waist
45″
36″
Hips
41.5″
Thigh
22.5″
Arm
13.5″
I’ve also been experimenting with embedding some reports from Tableau Public into this blog.
I thought it might be interesting to look at the weekly progress reports that Fitbit emails me each week. Here they are from most recent to oldest in mid July. Although there are a couple early on where I didn’t sync my Fitbit in time to get the last couple of days steps into the weekly report. It’s been a pretty steady improvement from week to week, which makes me happy. Although it also makes it harder to do better each week as well, but even if I can stay about where I am at now I’d be happy. The stars in the top row are days that I hit my goal of 7500 steps. And I do like to take Sundays as a rest day each week so I’m fine with missing that one.
It’s been one month since I first posted about making some changes, and things have been going well. I’m going for a two kilometer walk each weekday at lunch, and for the last two weeks I’ve added in a one kilometer morning walk to the coffee shop. My wife has started working from home, so instead of doing the drive thru on the way to dropping her off at work, we walk over to get our coffee and tea.
The focus of this plan isn’t specifically weight loss, but it’s easy to measure and is hopefully a beneficial side effect. My scale went weird for a few days, according to it, I dropped almost six pounds over night and then suddenly gained it back a few days later. I’m sure that didn’t actually happen but I’ve left those numbers in for now. I’ve dropped a little, about five pounds. I’ve gone from being around 255 lbs to being a little under 248 lbs.
What is really interesting is the Percent Body Fat numbers which dropped significantly on September 20th and seems to be staying low.
About ten years ago I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes. It came with the fairly common companions of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and obesity. I’m still on medication for all of those and haven’t had much success in dealing with them, although I haven’t gained weight in that time, I’ve stayed fairly consistently in the 255 lb range, occasionally get up near 270 and occasionally getting down as low as 240. Here is what my weight looked like since Jan 2012.
I’ve been thinking about this update for awhile and just haven’t been able to find the time to do it all in one go, so I’m going to split it into several smaller postings.
I did do a mid year update for 2018 so you would think there would be few things to review, but that isn’t really the case. There have been changes related to jobs, the loss of a friend, some additional work on the house, a couple of new apps I’ve been using, getting out and meeting new gamers, and the regular updates on various projects to cover.
I think I’ll start with an easy one, health and fitness. I see from last year’s New Years posting that I started at 260 lbs which was down from 268 from 2016.
I made some decent progress again this year, primarily around May and then maintaining it through the rest of the year. My actual weight on Jan 2 2018 was 252.5 lbs, which is a pretty good indication of most of the year, I’ve been bouncing between 250 and 255 since my initial drop in May. And, here is a nice little graph that shows my progress throughout the year.
Well, last year’s plan to get healthier and lose weight didn’t work out so well. I signed up for the 5 Peaks trail runs and a 5 K. Zombie run, but I didn’t make out too well with training for the running. I ended up pulling some muscles in my leg and having problems with my hip and lower back.
Spent some time in Chiro/Active Release getting that fixed up and then broke my leg on an easy hike at the end of July. That pretty much did me in for the rest of the year.
However, it’s now a new year, the leg is doing well, although it still hurts when I’ve been fairly active.
I’ve got a simpler plan this year, each day I’ll either do 10,000 steps, or at least an hour of some sort of exercise. If I can pull that off for at least 5 days out of 7 each week I’ll be happy.
I’ve got a few tools and apps that will help. I’ve got my Garmin Forerunner 305 that I’ve had for a few years which I can use to track my heartrate, pace, distance and map my route, although I mostly just use it for heartrate.
I got a Fitbit One for Christmas, which tracks the number of steps I do each day, as well stairs climbed and distance travelled. The Fitbit website keeps track of how well I’m doing and allows for weight tracking and Food logging as well. There is a Forum section and I joined the Calgary Fitbit group, which has 22 members.
The Fitbit One and Website can also be linked MyFitnessPal.com, which has a very good iPhone app and website for tracking the food you eat each day. This is going to be one of the harder things for me to do consistently, but it has been shown that if you do track your food, you have a much better success rate in losing weight. It can also be used to track the types of exercise that you do, and will feed the food and exercise info back to the Fitbit site.
Another app that I have been using for quite awhile is TactioHealth. It has nice graphs for tracking weight, Blood pressure, activity and several other things. It also imports the step information from the Fitbit. With the other new apps and websites I’m using, it’s become a little redundant, except maybe for the Blood pressure, have to check if any of the other ones track that. However, I’ve use it the longest, so it has more historical information than the other apps/sites, so I’m still using it.
I also use an app called Pedometer GPS+ when I’m walking. It has some nice mapping functions and other features, again, now somewhat redunant with other items.
I also picked up an Omron Blood Pressure moniter a few months ago that I can use to track my blood pressure.
On the days that it isn’t nice enough to get out and walk, I’ve got all sorts of fitness equipment downstairs, a couple wobble boards, three bosu’s, all sorts of resistance tubing, a bench, a couple of exercise balls and various weights. I’ve also got a recumbant exercise bike upstairs that I picked up used a couple months ago to help with strengthing my leg.
So, basically, I’ve got more than enough stuff to be able to do this to track my progress, I just need to do it 🙂
