There 2 concepts which have me puzzling causality and correlation.
At times I am finding it very difficult to sort out if my deficit or excess calories cause a weight loss when I overlay it with my hormonal cyclic pattern. I am very much of the opinion that over time, a calorie deficit produces weight loss, regardless of how one achieves this deficit.
But the question then becomes, is this a deficit for my body at this time?
I will give a concrete example, this past weekend the family went to the coast for a family retreat. Menu is fixed and geared to children as there are a lot of them. My daily goal is 1300 cal. On Saturday, I ate 407 over and Sunday I ate over 244. Knowing this weekend was coming up, and the type of meals to expect, I ate under but still came in over 231 calories for the week. These few calories do not account for an almost 2# increase (that would need to be over 5,000 extra which I didn't eat).
On Monday, the scale shows a 1.8 # increase. Today I am already back down .8#, for an overall gain of a pound. Water drinking to flush the probable excess sodium in the diet. And I am not even bugged by the spike up because I know it will come down over time as it has in the past.
The question is rather, how do I know, and perhaps one can't know, if this increase is due to the foods or rather my cycle, or maybe it is a combination of both. And so I wonder if I graphed my weights, overlayed with both calorie counts and cycle variations, would this give me better insight into how my body works both monthly and over time? I have all the data necessary to compile these graphs and am just not sure if I did so, would it give me any useful data to implement.
I looked at daytum and could not figure out how to use that site for this purpose.
I think it is possible that you'd learn something from doing that, and I'd be interested in seeing the results. I doubt you would get anything actionable, but you might get peace of mind if you saw a reasonable correlation between "phantom" weight gain and your cycle.
However, I think you'd be likely to see good results if you were to account for the impact of sodium, too - e.g. chart days intake of sodium against daily weighins to see if spikes like this one come after a day or two of high sodium.
There are myriad other variables involved in complex processes, as you probably know, though, and you may net zero for a lot of effort.
Whew! Too many variables most likely for you to truly nail it down over a tiny bit of time. Sorry to burst your bubble. I would think you might be able to theorize a "trend" or propesity for an if X then Y, but the whole mechanism is so complex, that I can't imagine how you could isolate any given variable enough to determine causality. If we could do that, then weight loss would be really easy and magical and we could all do it the same way with the same results guaranteed. Don't I wish!
Speaking from experience with my own data, you probably need 3 to 4 months minimum of numbers to get anything meaningful out of them. And even then, you may not find discernable patterns. I haven't managed to find any real pattern in relationship to my menstrual cycle, although there are some other things I can see: I tend to retain some water due to working out, and due to eating lots of carbs. But that's pretty much it. Some women seem to have a very definite, predictible water retention gain during particular portions of their menstrual cycle, and I actually kind of envy the regularity of that.
I did recently do an analysis of 4 months of data from last year to find my "sweet spot" of average daily deficit that produces the best weight loss. The data suggest that it is 700-800 per day (based on my FitDay records of food and activity), with smaller average deficits AND larger average deficits producing less weight loss per week.
But since I tend to overthink and overanalyze my numbers, I'm actually going to go scale-free for the month of April and simply do what works rather than looking at the daily scale number. (Because the daily scale number tends to drive me crazy.)
I have calorie and weight data starting Oct 6, 2009. I track my ovulation (have been for 28 years) so I have that data as well.
It is a bit difficult to see if ovulation/Tom/higher calories (which probably means higher sodium levels) causes the upward movements. My calorie average over this entire time is 1170. Neither my nails nor my hair have fallen out, I have increased my exercise to 2 miles with weight training of 14 minutes 4x/week. I ride horses 1x/week. I try walking around 1x/week outside.
Of course, if I could eat more calories, and still lose at a reasonable pace, that would be ideal. That is what I am hoping to discern. If not, then it has been a good exercise in learning to do spread sheets & graphs on my new Mac.
Couple of interesting observations for me but not enough evidence to say there is a definite correlation. It was worth the time inputting the data.
- I tend to gain or remain the same weight around ovulation
- tom is more variable than I thought. Some times I gain, sometimes, I lose, sometimes it reamins the same.
- it takes 2 months to lose about 10#
- I was getting impatient being in the 160's while I thought the 170's flew by, this wasn't factual.
-NSV I am learning to run averages on spread sheet.
- I still don't feel like I have a firm calorie count average for me to point to. I have an upper limit goal of 1300, I am still working on generating these numbers. I have an average of 1068 calories over the entire time period. My nails have not gotten weak or brittle. i am exercising more now than I have in a long time, and my moods are up beat. Always satisfying getting into smaller clothes.
Statistical analysis
