I don’t think I could sell a book called Math Can Help You Lose Weight, but the fact remains that my use of math in planning the pursuit of this goal has been essential. I know that one pound of human = roughly 3,500 calories; I know how to calculate the daily calorie intake required to maintain my weight for both sedentary metabolism and regular exercise; and I’ve even been tracking my weight on a handy chart generated by this site. Hey, I may even share that chart with you someday.
It’s also taught me to account for the range of possible deviation brought on by weighing yourself regularly. Your true mass is a moving target, and can vary a couple of pounds in either direction on any given day; mostly due to water and waste. So you have to step back, study longer trends, and not let one-day results freak you out. If you step on the scale on Monday, and then on Tuesday you measure one pound heavier; it is incredibly unlikely that you have actually gained a full pound. In order to do that, you would have had to eat everything you normally eat, PLUS an entire extra-large Domino’s hand-tossed with pepperoni and sausage. Did you do that? Probably not. More likely, you have simply retained more water, or something else has happened within the margin of error.
So if my weight suddenly plunges by a couple of pounds, I don’t celebrate prematurely, because I know that at least a partial rebound is likely only days away.
But something is happening now that’s a little outside of expectations. On Saturday I saw a significant drop – two full pounds less than Thursday’s measurement. Since I didn’t recall spending those two days in a sweat lodge, I figured that I had simply gone from an above-the-mark outlier to a below-the-mark outlier, my real weight was somewhere in-between, and future measurements would stabilize things. I know – from my math – that I should only be dropping between 0.2 and 0.3 pounds per day.
But then Sunday, my weight was still down. And on Tuesday, it was down another pound. I would have bet cash money that today the number would finally have corrected upwards. Instead, it has dropped yet another pound.
I know that my plan rests on some imprecise numerical assumptions, but this seems well outside the margin of error. Basically, for the last week, I’ve been losing twice as much weight as I should be, which puts me in an unhealthy range. Either my metabolism has kicked into a substantially higher gear, or my body has abruptly reformulated the amount of water it elects to carry around, or some combination of these. Or I’ve just had a lucky couple of days on the scale and reality is hiding in the next alley to mug me.
Either way, it’s the first time in this whole process that I’ve found myself thinking – hmmm, might have to start eating more. I know just how sorry you feel for me about that, Jimmy.