Fifty-ninth weight progress report

This post is yet another weight progress report, continuing the previous one, part of a long series since I started in January 2015.

 

 

My weight is about where it was a year ago—perhaps a couple of pounds lighter.

I still want to lose about 13 pounds, though I’d probably be satisfied with 10.

The very careful observer might notice that more of the weight curve has moved into the “overweight” category than in previous reports. That’s because I updated my height for the plots—I’ve shrunk about 1 cm since 2010.  I should probably change the plot scripts to use a time-dependent estimate of my height, rather than a constant, but that is too much bother for now (plus I don’t really know how my height varied over time).

Since my last report in mid-October, I’ve cycled an average of 2.23 miles/day, bringing my average over the last year up to 2.12 miles/day (a very small number).  I’ve averaged about 6.4k steps per day—down from earlier in the summer. I no longer have the Verily Study watch to keep track of my steps, but my walking was definitely reduced during the winter rains that we had, so I suspect that my exercise is way down overall.

Fifty-eighth weight progress report

This post is yet another weight progress report, continuing the previous one, part of a long series since I started in January 2015.

I’m also back to my pre-pandemic weight, after the distressing excursion into being overweight last year.

I still want to lose about 11 pounds, which would take over 2 years on my current trend.

Since mid-July, I’ve cycled an average of 2.34 miles/day, bringing my average over the last year up to 1.94 miles/day (a very small number).  I’ve averaged about 6.4k steps per day—down from earlier in the summer.  That walking has been mostly in the weekly “secret walk”  with my wife, supplemented with walks with a friend at UCSC who is trying to increase exercise.  I’ve not been blogging the secret walks much lately, as there have not been interesting routes or walks—we’ve mostly repeated walks we’ve done in the past.

I had a bunch of blood tests done last week, in preparation for my annual checkup tomorrow. Everything came out reassuringly normal. My cholesterol counts are still doing ok—the combination of rosuvastatin and ezetimibe seems to work well for me:

The only number close to a threshold is the triglycerides, but they seem to be a very noisy measurement, so I’m not concerned about it.

Fifty-seventh weight progress report

This post is yet another weight progress report, continuing the previous one, part of a long series since I started in January 2015.

I have now been at a normal weight (BMI below 25) for a full year, and my weight has dropped slightly over that year.

Even though I’ve been gradually increasing the upper end of my target range, I’m still quite a bit heavier than the top of that range, hovering just below being overweight. I’d like to get my weight down to the middle of my target range (so around 159 lbs, 13.5 lbs less than I now weigh).

For June and the first half of July 2022, my bike riding averaged only 1 mile/day—a very small amount, as I’ve not even been doing the once-a-week commute to campus. I’ve only gotten on my bike for a few shopping runs (groceries, cases of La Croix water, cat litter, … ).  I’ve averaged about 7.1k steps per day, though—so some of my bicycling has been replaced by walking.  That walking has been mostly in the weekly “secret walk”  with my wife, supplemented with walks with a friend at UCSC who is trying to increase exercise.  I have not been taking photos on all the walks, so many of them have no corresponding blog post.  I’ve also been walking downtown for the farmer’s market and to Food Bin for local grocery shopping, so some of my bicycle utility trips have also been replaced by walking. (Mowing the lawn, which I need to do about every 2 weeks, also gets my step count up.)

Fifty-sixth weight progress report

This post is yet another weight progress report, continuing the previous one, part of a long series since I started in January 2015.

My weight peaked about a year ago, but I managed to get it down out of the “overweight” range fairly quickly. It has been almost constant since then, but I’m hoping that the last month represents a new downward trend.

The longer-term picture shows that the year of staying home because of pandemic restrictions was not good for my weight control. I’m back to a fairly constant weight, but I’d still like to lose at least 10 pounds and preferably 15.

 

For Feb–May 2022, my bike riding averaged 2.26 miles/day—a big improvement over January, but still way down from the days when I bike commuted every day. I rode up to campus at least once a week during Spring quarter (often twice), and I’ve been trying to do more frequent grocery shopping by bike.  Previously I would take my trailer and load up, but now I only do that when my wife needs more cases of La Croix water.  A lot of our grocery shopping is a short walk to the Food Bin, but I’m trying to remember to shop at New Leaf on Tuesdays and Thursdays (senior discount days), to use the gift card we buy to support Alternative Family Education (5% of purchase amount goes to AFE).

I’ve averaged about 5.9k steps/day, mainly from the weekly “secret walk”  with my wife. February and March were particularly low (around 150k steps each month), but in May I got in over 240k steps, second only to last October, when I had about 250k steps.

I didn’t have to give the “project watch” back to Project Baseline yet, as there is one more year of the study.  I thought that there were 4 annual visits, but there are 4 years, so 5 visits (fencepost error on my part!).  Some of the visits were a bit delayed and stripped down because of COVID protocols, but there should be a more complete one next April, to finish things off. I had to delay the Project Baseline onsite visit a bit this time, because I gave blood on Feb 22, and Project Baseline wanted at least a 6-week delay (probably because of the number of vials of blood they take each time for various tests (including undetermined future tests). 

Project Baseline did a fairly full suite of routine blood and urine tests again this April, and everything came back reassuringly (but boringly) normal.

I gave blood again in May, and probably will continue giving blood about 5 times a year.  I used to give blood frequently when I was grad student, but got out of the habit at UCSC, because the blood drives were always at inconvenient locations or times (and the appointments always take a couple hours longer than scheduled, because they are always way behind schedule).  Despite my taking a daily 81mg aspirin, my blood still clots fairly quickly, which sometimes causes problems with getting a full unit (they had to stick a small needle in my other arm this time to get enough blood for testing, as the main needle was completely clogged by the time they got a full unit out).

ECG: 2-electrode vs. 3-electrode

In Lower PVC frequency, I said “I did not do direct comparisons of the 2-electrode and 3-electrode configurations—I’ll have to try that sometime soon.” So I did that earlier this week, recording resting ECGs first with a 3-electrode configuration (with the bias electrode on my sternum, halfway between the LA and RA electrodes) and then with a 2-electrode configuration (with the bias wire clipped to the RA electrode).  The 60 Hz noise was slightly higher with the 2-electrode configuration, but after filtering and signal averaging the two recordings were almost identical:

The waveforms after signal averaging were remarkably similar. The PVC burden was also similar (20.1% for the 3-electrode recording and 20.5% for the 2-electrode recording).

The pulse rate from looking at time between spikes worked well for the resting recordings, but the autocorrelation method failed completely, so I did not plot it. The rapid fluctuation in heart rate within a narrow range is real, not an artifact of the algorithm—the heart beats are not perfectly periodic, and the PVCs may be making them even less periodic. The 2-electrode recording probably started a little after 400 seconds—PteroDAQ only time stamps when the file was saved, not what the t=0s time was. I should probably fix PteroDAQ to change that, recording both.

I tried recording a session on the exercise bike also. The PVCs are mainly during resting at the beginning of the session and at the end of a recovery at the end of the session—the PVC burden was only 1.4%.

For the exercise recording, the noise really disrupted the spike-based pulse detection, but did not interfere as much with the autocorrelation-based pulse detection. My peak pulse rate was about 151.5 bpm, by the autocorrelation measure. I’m not sure whether the sudden changes in pulse rate at 100s (when I started pedaling) and around 556s (about 130s into the recovery time) are real or not—the noise in the recording makes it a little difficult to determine the “correct” pulse rate.

The noise during exercise was not 60Hz noise and seemed to vary with whether I was inhaling or exhaling, so I think that it was probably caused by EMG signals from the pectoral muscles or perhaps the diaphragm. The spike detector was clearly missing a lot of the spikes, but making it more sensitive would probably result in false triggering on the EMG noise. I’m wondering whether putting the electrodes on my back, over the scapulae, would reduce the EMG noise, but placing those electrodes and clipping to them would be difficult without an assistant.

The autocorrelation-based pulse detection seems more reliable when exercising, as my pulse is more periodic and has few PVCs, and the autocorrelation method is less susceptible to aperiodic noise.  The spike-based pulse detection seems more reliable when resting, when the pulse is not as periodic and PVCs disrupt the pattern.

I’m also wondering whether a more strenuous exercise session would raise my pulse rate, or whether I’m getting close to my maximum heart rate.  The standard formula for maximum heart rate by age suggests that this may be close to my maximum, but the exercise does not seem all that strenuous, and a couple of years ago I could routinely push to 170 bpm (though perhaps on a device that was an unreliable reporter—it was built into a treadmill at the gym).  So sometime in the next few weeks I’ll try using a higher power output and seeing where my heartbeat tops out.  I’ll probably need to increase the cadence, rather than the resistance, as I’ve been using about 70rpm and 28Nm to get about 205W.  Raising that to 80rpm or even 90rpm is probably easier than increasing the torque.