My gym has a nifty scale that measures all sorts of things such as weight, muscle mass, body fat, and indications of where it is distributed. Although I am highly skeptical with how accurate devices like this are, I think they are good as a comparative tool to look at the device. They installed it at the end of October last year and you can email results to yourself (which my OCD side tagged, labelled and archived so they were easy to compare).
After six months I thought it would be interesting to look at changes in the baseline and what I think may have caused them.
Given how much I like to enjoy myself trying new foods and restaurants when travelling I wasn’t so surprised at spikes on the trips such as Christmas or new projects abroad. One really surprisingly (but really shouldn’t be surprising) is the impact that the ski holiday had on my weight. Yes, you’re out skiing all day burning calories but probably not enough to balance out the hearty meals (breakfast, French meals) and the amazing four course dinners we would have (complete with wine and Apéritif)
I’m surprised that Brazil didn’t have as much effect as I thought it would have, although the combination of a bit of food poisoning and most Brazilian foods not really being heavily processed probably had something to do with it.
Nice chart! Have you considered, that after your ski holiday you had also gained weight in muscles, not only in fat? That would explain the huge spike there, since muscles are heavier than fat, which combined with some additional fat would be even more weight than fat alone.
Hi Bernd,
Good point, and one that I had considered. However, this might have been the case if I hadn’t been going to the gym but had stopped doing weight training to go skiing, and not sure you can put that much muscle on in such a short amount of time!