2018 Calorie, Exercise And Weight Changes

Context

Following a festive period a couple of years ago, I began a weight loss diet in early January to lose the Christmas-period pounds. Working on the assumption that the laws of thermodynamics applied to me as much as the rest of the universe, I didn't care about what I ate, as long as I consumed fewer calories than I used.

As I think that there is a lot of mis-information in the huge market that is the weight-management sector, I made sure that I ate everything I was told not to; click-bait articles such as "the six foods you MUST NOT EAT if you want to lose weight" were my bread and butter. I made sure to eat them all, and show that I could still lose weight, just by not eating too much of them.

In 2018, I decided to be a bit more formal about this, and record a daily diary of approximate calorie intake and a few things to do with what I ate and what exercise I did. The idea was to come up with a dataset for regression analysis to try to learn a bit more about the effect of calories and exercise on changes in my weight.

My goal was to get down to 11 stone and a single digit number of pounds in advance of my work Christmas party, ready to put it all on again over the festive period 18/19 and have a good set of regression coefficients to tell me how to lose it again in 2019.