wwol: week one report

Weight Watchers has used the slogan "Give us a week, we'll take off the weight." As a methodological matter, when you compare a single measure taken right before an intervention with one intervention afterwards, the estimated effect of the intervention will tend to be overstated, at least if there is any way the high earlier measure was part of what prompted the intervention in the first place. So a year with an unusually high number of drunk-driving deaths prompts a state to pass a stricter drunk driving law, which then looks like it has a larger effect than it 'really' does because part of what had led to the spike in deaths the previous year was unusually bad luck. With weight, you have day-to-day fluctuation around one's 'real' weight, and so you might expect that people start diets after weigh-ins that are bad partly due to bad random fluctuation. This would then lead to the expectation of an unusually good first weigh-in followed by tapering off, although only for those people whose diets were prompted by a dismaying turn on the scale.

Anyway, I have committed to staying on this diet for ten reasonably good weeks, which I hope and plan will be consistent with ten consecutive weeks, but if not I'm not letting myself off the hook. This week features extensive use of what I call my orange gambit, based on my observation that you rarely see a fat person who eats a pound of carrots a day. So I had a pound of carrots six of the first seven days, not even getting into the crazy consumption of rice cakes and Lean Cuisine meals. Here is my WWOL points tracker for the first week:



I don't always enter the time of the meal in the right place, so it's not like there are days when I really blew all my points in the morning. Also, if you look at the activity column, you'll notice I worked out fine the first four days and then stopped -- this corresponds to my portable DVD player breaking and thus rendering my elliptical trainer too tedious (a replacement part is on order, although I could also download an audiobook and listen to it on my iPod).

My first weigh-in was today and, consistent with the expectations above, went well:



Anyway, one week down, nine to go. I appreciate all who said they were rooting for me. The guy who commented and said he wasn't rooting for me is appreciated in his own, different, way.