{"id":35,"date":"2007-09-30T06:37:44","date_gmt":"2007-09-30T06:37:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.gregbueno.com\/wp\/vexvox\/2007\/09\/30\/always_the_skeptic\/"},"modified":"2007-09-30T06:37:44","modified_gmt":"2007-09-30T06:37:44","slug":"always_the_skeptic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/2007\/09\/30\/always_the_skeptic\/","title":{"rendered":"Always the skeptic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I stepped on the digital scale this morning, and it read 200.0 pounds. That&#039;s a 15 pound difference from my reading on the analog scale from a month ago. Progress? Yes, but not the drastic progress I may have been lead to believe.<\/p>\n<p>When I was researching scales on <a href=\"http:\/\/ask.metafilter.com\/\">Ask Metafilter<\/a>, I ran across a link to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fourmilab.ch\/hackdiet\/\">Hacker&#039;s Diet<\/a>, which is an engineering perspective on weight loss. It advocates the conventional wisdom of eating less and exercising more, but rather than speaking from a health or fitness professional viewpoint, it explains things in engineering terms. An old journalism professor of mine said design is information, and the Hacker&#039;s Diet is designed to address an audience not easily swayed by the word of athletes.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.physicsdiet.com\/\">Physicsdiet.com<\/a> is a web-based implementation of the Hacker&#039;s Diet. Rather than just take scale readings at their face value, the Hacker&#039;s Diet calculates moving averages and other kinds of metrics to determine the <em>trend<\/em> of a particular weight loss regimen. To do that, daily weight readings are required.<\/p>\n<p>I started tracking that information a week ago, and I started out at 205.4 lbs. That&#039;s a pound less than 10 days ago, when I visited the doctor and got a reading of 206. In the week since starting that tracking, I&#039;m down five pounds. The moving average of my weight loss only indicates a 1.5-pound loss so far, but I&#039;m not skeptical about that.<\/p>\n<p>I&#039;m wondering if my initial reading of 215 lbs. on the analog scale was accurate to begin with. When I compare readings between the digital and analog scales, the former indicates I&#039;ve gone from 205 to 204 in a week. The latter now says I&#039;m 205, after weeks and weeks of plateauing at 208.<\/p>\n<p>I found it suspicious that the analog scale showed a five-pound loss from 215 to 210 in that first week of exercise. I wonder if perhaps I really started at 210 pounds, and my loss for the month is not 15 but 10 pounds.<\/p>\n<p>Neither number is anything to complain about. Rather I should be happy.<\/p>\n<p>But from here on out, I&#039;m going to rely on the digital scale. It&#039;s giving me numbers I prefer anyway.<\/p>\n<p>By the way, if you want to see how well I&#039;m progressing, my Physicsdiet.com profile is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.physicsdiet.com\/Public.aspx?u=NemesisVex\">public<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I stepped on the digital scale this morning, and it read 200.0 pounds. That&#039;s a 15 pound difference from my reading on the analog scale from a month ago. Progress? Yes, but not the drastic progress I may have been lead to believe. When I was researching scales on Ask Metafilter, I ran across a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkgj-z","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}