Body Statistics

First thing this morning after waking up and having a wee, I took all my measurements. It’s 4 days since I did the tape measure stats, and 3 days since the scales stats. Not much has happened (not great feedback). In fact as many stats saw progress as got worse.

I have to recognise that both in using the tape measure, and with the scales, there’s a reasonable error built into each reading. Hopefully over time, the underlying true statistic change will show through, but right now it just looks like noise. Of course this isn’t helped by the fact that all I’ve done so far is address my eating habits and not my exercise habits.

So this isn’t positive feedback. In fact it’s slightly negative. Not negative because I’m doing something wrong though. But negative because I haven’t shown progress when I’ve been doing ‘good’. I have to recognise that. So where do I find the positive in it? Well I’ve taken the measurements again, which is building the Habit of doing it regularly. And I’m also building up data which will help estimate the error in each reading.

So focusing on and building on the positive aspect, the best way to establish the error is to take lots of readings without an expectation of a change in the underlying measurement. Right, so I should do the measurements every day for this week, and maybe next week. I know the numbers will be bouncing everywhere. But how much they bounce shows me how much ‘noise’ there is in each measurement. When I know that, then I can know subsequently when a measurement has changed by an amount that represents a significant change in the true underlying statistic.

Anyway, my Body Statistics Feedback page has been updated today, and I’ll try to do the same stats every day this week.