Healthy You - second session

[lnr]

Weight loss talk

So Tuesday was a) my birthday and b) my second online class with the Tier 3 Weight Management "Eat well, move more" Healthy You programme.

We have a workbook to accompany the course, and I was somewhat surprised to discover us jumping ahead to session 4, which was entirely about exercise. So this fortnight's session didn't contain anything about food at all. We had about half an hour talking about exercise recommendations, and about half an hour of gentle exercise. And a suggestion at the end of making another SMARTER goal around exercise "snacking" again. I did mention that last week's goal had made me cross, and the course leader for exercise sounded surprised, but did ask why. I explained that the goal did not seem very relevant to me, as I already meet and exceed most of the NHS exercise suggestions, and that this was adding 5 minutes a day, burning around 17 calories, and not getting my heart rate into even the moderate zone. With an inadvertent pun I said that while I'd done it anyway it felt like a bit of a pointless exercise. So, I have suggestions of things to do this week - increasing the time or distance of my existing exercise, or to increase the intensity of my cycling if it's safe to do so. I can also up the weights or intensity of my "snacking" but if I do I should make sure I had a proper warm-up and cool down to make sure I don't cause any injury. Which I suppose is fair enough.

So at the moment I don't have a SMARTER goal (I can't remember the ER anyway, Evaluate and Review? Something else?) but just a woolly thought of OK, I'll add 5 minutes throughout the day, I'll try to add something flexibility and something balance and a squat or similar for legs and something with weights for arms and something like their seated plank for core muscles. But 5 minutes a day still feels pointless. I think what would *actually* be good would be finding a pilates class, preferably on a Friday late morning or early afternoon! Plus trying to actually notice when my watch tells me I haven't moved enough this hour. It buzzes at xx:50 every hour during the day time, and I ignore it.

Second dose of Wegovy taken. No effects or side effects noticed yet. I do have a bit of a stiff neck today, and I think maybe he was right about not waving round a pair of 2kg weights without warming up. Or maybe I'm just not very well, I have a slight headache too.

I've also noted another new change bloody Google have made to the Fitbit app. As well as removing the web pages where you could look at your data they've now also update the weight tracking bits of the app itself. It no longer has a BMI over time chart (which I liked to use/screenshot when sharing information with health professionals) but also it's changed the number of points it displays on the "All time" graph. I've got weight numbers going back to 1994. Sometimes only one or two entries a year, but sometimes a reading every week. It's showing about 30 or so points in total, and the rounding as a result means some things you could point to on the graph are no longer visible. You can't see my sister's wedding any more (losing weight to fit in my bridesmaid dress). It's hopeless! So I'm going to have to export all the more recent data which isn't also recorded elsewhere and start constructing my own graphs again. Gah!

Comments

[bugshaw]

My Fitbit All Time weight now starts at 30 Dec 2022! You saw how many years I had data for. Again, very useful to wave at doctors to show losing and regaining. I'm hoping it's a glitch and it will reappear again (though we might be stuck with the fewer, averaged data points).

[ailbhe]

I thought I was imagining the Fitbit stuff. Huh. Boo.

[lnr]

I just poked the Fitbit app some more, trying to work out how to download data, and this is what I found (it repeats some of the above, because I wrote it briefly for Facebook, before bringing the images here too):

What the hell, Fitbit. Since the Googlification they've been gradually removing web access to your data, and now if you go to fitbit.com you just end up in the Google Store. But it's worse

They've changed their app in the last couple of weeks, and the All Time weight loss graph is now *hopeless* as it's been oversimplified too much. But if I click on the ... menu, Manage Data, and then click on the Review Data link, I get what looks exactly like the previous version of the app! It's clearly a website (it even had a cookie popup) but I wonder how the heck I get the URL of it out so I can use it from an actual browser?

I actually wanted to export my data, so I can make my own graphs again, but that caught me completely by surprise!

[lnr]

[heh, I love that the fitbit nerdery has completely eclipsed the actual weight loss support group talk]

[sweh]

In my own attempt to "eat less and exercise more" I'm trying to force myself to exercise most days.

In the past 22 days I've succeeded on 19 of them; 9 days on my exercise bike, 7 days fast walking (av 4.2mph), 2 days raking leaves (yard work is exercise!), 1 day elliptical (which was a failure; I had to stop after 7 minutes)

Bike durations going up, which is good. But I'm hating it!

Gnuplot FTW!



Two of those walking days were to the store and back (1.5 miles) but includes carrying heavy stuff back, so it's really more exercise than it seems. Carrying an extra 30lbs for 3/4 mile is exhausting.

I find it interesting that fast walking for 30 minutes burns twice the calories than cycling for 25, but the exercise bike is something I can do in bad weather!

[shermarama]

Is most of your exercise from cycling only? Because completely apart from matters of weight loss, I think it could be a good idea to diversify, if so - I certainly find as I'm getting older that while just being generally fit used to be enough to keep everything going, now I need to use specific bits to keep those bits in use, and not have problems just from, e.g. waving 2kg weights around... And given all the physio I've done for my back and all the indoor and outdoor cycling I do, it's still surprising how much I can get my heart rate up in a couple of minutes, given the right exercises. Weighted squats and weighted reverse lunges are good for that, and then five minutes of core strength stuff (generally known as 'leg-waving' in this household) makes a whole load of other things work better too. I mean, my goal there isn't to have met a threshold or standard, my goal is to do things that make my daily life better, really.