Day 4

I've been reading a lot about giving up alcohol and weight loss.  Then I get distracted by becoming vegan and weight loss.  Then I really push out the boat and spend an hour reading a body builders' forum where they discuss alcohol consumption and diet.

I've always believed in the logic that you shouldn't weigh yourself every day, fluctuations, water consumption etc. and that once a week is fine.  However, I'm a numbers person, so data helps me to understand things.

I only started daily weight tracking in June, when I was all excited about my possible new job.  So my numbers start from June 15th, a nice mid-month starting point.  To make this interesting I also added exercise and alcohol consumption into the spreadsheet.

From June 1-14 I was probably drinking virtually every night and working out 3 times a week for 1 hour.

From June 15th I have a spreadsheet list of days, weight, exercise that is tracked in 30 min blocks (so 1.5 is one hour/30 min) and wine which is (unfortunately) tracked in bottles (e.g. 2).

Logged:

• Over the course of 16 days I've managed 9 as alcohol free. 
• 2 of the alcohol days had 1 bottle of wine while the remainder had 2.
• 8 days of exercise at 10.5 hours.  

From my university statistics days, I can start to see some trends emerging.  After a few days of alcohol in a row, weight goes up.  Where alcohol and exercise occur on the same line, weight goes up in those days at a slower pace but still goes up.  After a string of 0 alcohol days and heavy exercise days, weight goes down.  Fair enough.

My cheap and cheerful gym has a fancy scale it magically can formulate body fat etc. through standing on it on bare feet and holding on to a bar.  I've been using it around the last day of the month and then logging these in-depth numbers, I have these going back on a monthly basis since December.  Patterns emerge again, as expected, January's numbers are not great due to December indulgences and April/May were headed in the wrong direction due to a spate of birthdays (alcohol), all inclusive holiday (alcohol/no exercise), trip back to the States (alcohol/way too much food/no exercise).

While I only started this in-depth logging of activities in June and don't have data for other months, I can guarantee that this was my lowest alcohol consumption of 2016 with the highest number of exercise minutes.  As well, my focus on clean vegan eating in the later weeks of the month was definitely an improvement over other months.

So how did the end of June numbers compare to other months, keeping in mind that I've only been at this effort for around 15 days?

• Weight and bmi were in my lowest 3 count.  May and June were the highest, so now headed in the right direction.  March numbers were the best, not sure what I was doing in February to make that happen.
• Body fat clocked in at 26.5, the lowest of the 7 months.  Diet, exercise and removing a bit of the wine sugar seem to be having an effect.  My previous lowest in February again was 28.5.

Sidenote, my gym does little displays such as 'the effects of sugar,' 'the effects of alcohol,' etc.  They have a nice poster of a doughnut and a caption about 'one glass of wine equates to the sugar of one doughnut.'  Yikes.

• Muscle mass is the highest of 7 months.  I've been doing the strength training classes, not really my cup of tea but needs must.
• After 6 months of bone mass at 2.1 it inched up to 2.2, so good going there.
• Metabolic age, a fictitious number that comes from all the other inputs I've been between 29 to 33 in earlier months, a new personal best of 26.
• Visceral fat held steady at 3.5.  April was a whopping 4.  This number in particular I'm targeting as it's the fat around the organs such as the heart and liver.  As I have genetically high cholesterol this one keeps me in line. 

So I feel like a half of month of changes while small have made a big impact.  My goal is to make it even better for July.

Food:  the vegan diet seems to have kick started some changes, but I can't squeeze out too many more improvements on that front.  Processed food is out, fruits and veg are in.  I'm doing fish and dairy (cheese) about once a week each and have reached the right balance of carbs and protein needed to support the fitness regime.  95% vegan is probably my best bet to be able to adhere to a consistent food pattern.

Exercise:  Mon/Tues/Thurs are now 1.5 hour days.  Wed and Sun are days off.  Fri and Sat are the wildcards, usually I'll go to the gym for an hour on one of those days and do something lightly exercise-like on the other, such as a few hours on the allotment.  I don't see me adding much in this area as I feel that I've reached a good balance of sweaty days vs days off. 

Sugar:  Probably worth a mention as I know many diets pinpoint this one, in particular when alcohol is removed.  I'm not much of a sugar person...well outside of sugar disguised as alcohol.  Cakes, cookies, cola, chocolate, none of it does it for me.  I'll have a piece of fruit in the morning at that's my biggest sugar hit of the day (on a non-alcohol day).  A bigger risk is crunchy, salty things such as nacho chips or crisps/potato chips or deep-fried anything.  I solve this problem by not buying them in the first place as rationing is not my strong point.  Popcorn consumption has been stepped up heavily in the meantime as the new snack of choice, sans salt.  

Alcohol:  This one is the one that is completely negotiable and probably the biggest impact I can make for July.  So now to figure out what to do with this one.  Needless to say, no alcohol tonight as I want to be bright and breezy for tomorrow's festival.