Blessed by the Potato

Another quarter where I put back on ~3 lbs. The actual experience was even more up-and-down: I spent a lot of time visiting hospitals and stressed so even holding the line was hard. I went on to vacation to PEI, and decided not to worry or track, and managed to pack on almost 4 lbs in 2 weeks on my ice cream diet. Then started getting back on track for a week or two, only to be hit with a big deadline and a week of late nights and a few all-nighters, and put 2 lbs back on again, then started losing again. So crept up a tiny bit slowly, shot up 6 lbs, then lost ~4. So I did the opposite of my goal from last quarter.

I also discovered a really dumb source of the creep part of that phase: I was aiming for balance rather than a deficit. I was sticking to my habit of chewing gum as a replacement for my habit of snacking, but not paying attention to the gum. There was a big sale on Juicy Fruit, so I stocked up. Like, 80 packs over 4 trips to the store stocked up. Aaaand as it turns out, Juicy Fruit is not a sugar-free gum. I was getting ~150-200 calories/day from my gum chewing, which works out to be about the unexplained creep I was finding.

Just a few weeks ago, FitBit decided they didn’t want my business and blew up their app. It started crashing, and taking minutes to log food, if it even would. I had to reset my phone multiple times per day, and they were releasing a new bugfix version every day that just wouldn’t solve the issue — and added a big battery drain and a lost connection to my tracker to boot. Despite many direct bug reports, and many people in various forums complaining about how the latest version was just plain broken, FitBit never seemed to think to just roll the app back until they could fix whatever they were trying to do in the new version. I found instructions online for how to roll back to a previous version (IIRC 5.3 seemed stable if you’re having the same issues), but rather than mess around with that, I ended up switching to Samsung Health.

It has the same core functionality, with a few pros and cons over FitBit. It’s fast and responsive — FitBit was never that fast to search, and often had a bug where it would revert whatever you put in for servings 3 or 4 times before finally taking it. However, Samsung is very inflexible about how you tell it how much you’re eating: servings or bust. FitBit made it really easy to measure your intake: cups or grams, servings or slices or fractions of a whole cake/pizza with a little drop-down. Samsung also puts your calories burned in a separate screen from your calories consumed, making it a bit hard to see how you’re doing on your budget — I really liked how FitBit had them on one screen, with your desired deficit goal included so you could see right away if you on track for the day or not (and with the past week’s data right there too, not another screen away).

My Dad got me an early birthday present in the form of a Samsung smart watch (Active 2 40mm if you’re curious) to replace my FitBit for activity tracking. I like it, though for such a fancy piece of kit it’s kind of ridiculous to me that you can’t customize some things (or they’re too hard for me to figure out). There’s a huge variety of watch faces, and you can choose a variety of data points to display (from heart rate and steps to weather, other time zones, or alerts from apps) in various places in the watch face. You can fine-tune the colours and the background. But I can’t choose 12 or 24-hour clocks, or whether to hide the leading 0 for single-digit hours. The 12/24hr thing might be secretly linked to how the host phone displays time, but the leading 0 definitely isn’t. And I can’t choose to make the font size of the seconds smaller than the hours:minutes unless that happens to be designed into a particular clock face.

Anyway, fall is here, which will bring with it leaf-raking, curling, and only two more weeks of grant season, so I know this next quarter is going to go better!

Of course, fall also brings Thanksgiving. And Birthday. Hamerican Thanskgiving. Potatomas.

Halloween.

November Halloween candy sales.

And I have a house full of Girl Guide cookies that I really hope my little marketing whiz will sell to someone who is not me. But until then, there they are…

Gulp. I should probably up the motivation with some kind of commitment mechanism. Let me sleep on that.