…no really.  The whole purpose of having these fitness trackers is to provide data about your daily habits.  While no one should expect these things to nail an exact number, it’s supposed to be giving you reasonably accurate data, let’s say within five percent of a value.  In my attempts to calibrate the Basis against trusted and known baselines (my FitBit that I have also calibrated, a Garmin GPS watch with heart rate monitor), I have never been able to get the Basis to get the calorie estimates to be within better than 200 calories over (always over) the other estimates.  In some cases it could be 400-500 calories off.  This is counter-intuitive since it has heart rate data to use in the calorie calculations.

I didn’t need my monthly measurements to tell me that the last month things were still going off the rails.  Yeah, I sort of cleaned up my eating on most days, except for the indulgences in desserts and cookies every night.  Yeah, I did start working out a bit, but that still equated to only a half dozen work out days over the whole month.  I don’t want to know incremental steps of progress but I do have to recognize that my lack of ability or eagerness to get back on the fitness rails is causing things to go completely out of whack.

In a recent article on Huffington Post, they covered the issue of the USDA planning on revising their dietary guidelines to not only encourage good health but also environmental sustainability.  In these guidelines they are going to call for a greater emphasis on plant based diets and a reduction in meat consumption.  The article doesn’t spend much more time on the regulations but covers the politics going on surrounding these changes.  In doing so they point out the fundamental problem with our current regulations and therefore why they work so poorly in practice.

As a fan of the Back To the Future franchise I remember thoroughly enjoying the whole constructed reality of the “future”, which is now pretty much the present day.  There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of articles listing what they “got right” or what they “got wrong.”  Not coincidentally it all revolves around some of the more outlandish predictions.  Did we really need an article to highlight that we don’t have hoverboards or flying cars?  At the same time was it really a stretch that we would have nostalgia themed restaurants?  Just like with Star Trek, some things we’ve leapfrogged beyond what was predicted while others are still outlandish.  There is a category, however, of things which we actually made, and maybe even tried to use, that we just simply discarded or that just look different enough that people aren’t recognizing them:

This day one year ago I was going to be embarking on the beginning of one and a half to two years of self experimentation in the name of figuring out what works best for my body and documenting the process for any internet passerby to read.  I had just come off of my first marathon and had hoped to get a second one under my belt in 2014.  I had hoped to lean out a little bit, increase my strength fitness and complete my second marathon strong, regardless of how long it took.  I missed the mark by just a little bit…

It is no secret that the path to health is a good diet and moderate exercise.  What “good” means and what “moderate” means is left up to someone else to sort out.  Mostly I think that is because a one size fits all model is not applicable.  Over the past two years I went from having my weight and body fat really dialed in well to everything going to shit.  There were ups and downs in my exercise levels.  There were ups and downs on my diets.  There were some unavoidable life events too.  Is there something that I could learn from all of this data that would give me some definitive indication of what is going wrong?