Annual Review 2022: A Middling Year of Diet and Fitness

This is a bit of a divergence from the usual annual review process because it is being done in the middle of the year. I therefore am just putting this up here as a way to do comparisons in the future and to have a more complete dataset.

I ended 2021 on a bit of an upswing, having just completed my firs 10K in awhile. I had high hopes, as I often do, to carry that momentum forward into 2022. While there was some faltering in the beginning I did manage to get things very dialed in in the March time frame. I was able to kind of middle my way through a bit for a good part of the year but by the end I let everything blow up, crash, and burn.

Goal Accountability

I began 2022 with some tweaked goals for each day, that are listed below. The main categories were the same but how I would hit it changed. They are essentially eating a balanced clean diet, get good rest, get some minimum modicum of exercise, and do some things for cognitive health reasons. This is not “run 20 miles a day”, “meditate an hour a day”, or anything like that. Over the long run not doing these things is a net negative. So I’ll sound like a broken record but will be trying to do better in the coming year. Back to this year the five goals were:

• Goal 1: Eat a Blue Zones inspired plant dominant diet
• Goal 2: Get 7-8 hours of sleep a night
• Goal 3: Physical activity levels such that either get 10K or more steps in a day or burn more than 2800 calories. This translates into either moving more or working out or both.
• Goal 4: Daily calisthenics or yoga in order to increase agility, muscle balance, and strength.
• Goal 5: Brain exercises one or more of:
  • 15 minutes meditation
  • 30+ minutes musical instrument
  • 30+ minutes foreign language learning

What we have is the grade for each of the categories for each of the 4-week periods that make up a whole year (a total of 13). I started off the year on a bit of a yo-yo. January was pretty dialed in but February was a disaster. March was really dialed in on Sleep, Physical activity, and brain exercises, while not too bad on the others. All of them though degraded at various rates over the rest of the year until all of them except sleep ended with dismal below C grades. Looking at the aggregated daily grade graph it is a pretty stark drop off after the middle of the year mark too.

Having much of the year bouncing around the B mark isn’t that bad. It isn’t great but not bad. But by the 200th day the grades really fall off the cliff dismally bouncing around the 1.0 to 1.5 mark. In the end that dragged all the grades down to some of their lowest levels.

The final grade for 2022 is the third lowest grade for the year, with 2019 being the lowest and 2017, at 2.42 (C+), being the second lowest. We are essentially in the same rut as in those years but with some areas performing better than others. Diet, at 2.43 (C+) had the second worst showing of the years with 2019’s 1.99 (C-) being the absolute worst. Sleep wasn’t too bad at 3.5 (B+) and is sort of in the middle of the pack. Activity at 2.54 (C+) is actually the worst of the series. It is actually the first non-B grade I’ve scored in that category. Training at 1.68 (D+) is a pretty piss poor performance but it is a category I struggle with every year so it is actually a pretty normal bad grade. Lastly, the brain exercises at 2.31 (C+) isn’t a great grade but again something I struggle to score well on so a pretty normal bad grade.

I wrote last year that I thought about scrapping this whole concept if it doesn’t start producing better results in keeping me on track. 2022 was not the year for that to happen apparently.

Nutrition

While my overall nutrition grade in the goal accountability grades was essentially the same there were some improvements in some of the numbers

Lets delve into these numbers a bit. First the goodt:

• I consumed slightly fewer calories on average and burned slightly more calories. The delta is a bit in the noise which means my body composition over the year netted out to be about the same, which it did.
• I’m getting almost all of my macro/micro nutrients (except just under on Vitamin D and Vitamin E) in my diet. Vitamin E is a even further off this year than last year was to its 2020 but once I take my standard multi-vitamins and Vitamin D drops everything exceeds the RDA values.
• I once again exceeded by Calcium and Potassium RDA levels unlike prior years
• I held steady on the Omega-6/Omega-3 fatty acid and Calcium/Magnesium ratios
• Sodium levels are still high but came down even further in 2022.

The bad list gets worse though:

• Alcohol was down a bit to the equivalent of 2.5 drinks a day on average but that is still above the 2 drinks a day threshold I’ve set for myself.
• Caffeine went up to almost 200 mg per day, well within the chemical dependency threshold.
• Fiber was yet again lower
• The Alkalinity ratio got better but not enough to be even on the right side of the dial. This is also a measure of how much whole food plant based my diet is and it is tracking on the wrong side.
• My cholesterol numbers came down a bit but are still 100 mg over the RDA and 200 mg over the targets I’ve set for myself.

Body Composition

Even though my 2021 training didn’t get my body composition dialed in as much as possible I had hoped that 2022 would be the year I could do that. Initially I made little progress but after a bit of a reboot in March I did have things a bit more dialed in I even held that for a bit but in the end things went off the rails and I was right back where I started:

These body fat and weight numbers are just too high. The body fat number is especially too high because the numbers in this graph are from the Withings Scale’s bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) method to measure body composition. This always measures my body fat percentage off by several percentage points, but does capture general trends. When we look at the net calories versus weight over the year you can see how I got where I was:

I was up and down throughout the middle of the year, after my reboot in March, but by the time the end of September rolled around things went off the rails. So ultimately I ended the year exactly where I started it body composition wise, which isn’t good.

Looking forward to 2023

So now it’s goal setting and assessment time for 2023. First the final assessment of 2022 is not great. I’d say net on net it is worse than 2021 even. Once again the blood work at my physical came in pretty much fine but also once again I know I am operating on borrowed time as I coast through without things being dialed in through my middle age years.

With nothing dialed in and no momentum from 2022 all I can say is that I hope to try harder to hit the goals I set for myself in 2022 for 2023:

• Goal 1: Eat a Blue Zones inspired plant dominant diet
• Goal 2: Get 7-8 hours of sleep a night
• Goal 3: Physical activity levels such that either get 10K or more steps in a day or burn more than 2800 calories. This translates into either moving more or working out or both.
• Goal 4: Daily calisthenics or yoga in order to increase agility, muscle balance, and strength.
• Goal 5: Brain exercises one or more of:
  • 15 minutes meditation
  • 30+ minutes musical instrument
  • 30+ minutes foreign language learning
  • Etc.