Graphing my weight loss

This is pretty cool, I was just fiddling with Google's new Fusion Tables and made this useful plot of my weight loss over time from when I started tracking it on MyFitnessPal (Oct 2011) to now (May 2012). Very awesome to see the details in this time format. You can see the (small) plateaus and how actually they have been very short, usually on the order of a couple of 1-2 weeks long. Surprising.

Also interesting to see is this Christmas vacation, where I stopped recording on MyFitnessPal for about 3 weeks. Here you can see the only time in the graph where my weight loss was not decreasing week-by-week, in fact it did jump up about 3 lbs. But it's good to see that's the only place where I backtracked, and otherwise it's been full sail ahead since Oct 2011. Pretty motivating to see all my work lined up like this.

Weight loss by date (Oct 2011 - May 2012)

Maybe it's just the Math degree talking, but this data is pretty hot. You can't argue with the obvious negative slope here. But to see it better we gotta kick it up a notch, I didn't see Google's new code have fancy stuff like a least-squares/linear regression so let's copy it over to Excel and plot a Linear Regression line to get a more "summarized" view of what the data looks like...

That's some sexy linear regression, huh

I dunno about you, but it looks like whatever I am doing to lose weight (explained in detail here) is mathematically sound ;) This graph here is a bit easier to see cause we're removing those outliers (like the Christmas Break over-eating) and focusing more on the actual trend line itself. Which is clearly going downwards, and at a nice sustainable pace too. Math!

What are the takeaways here? Well I'm definitely sure that the weight loss is going well, though that was obvious before. I think the general thing I get from these graphs, especially the linear regression, is that a few little ups and downs are not really a big deal, the main thing to focus on is the solid, consistent work, and that I can very safely say that I am doing an awesome job. The trend line is good, but I want to continue it further until more things come in line (like body fat percentage, etc). Overall though, this is awesome to see, and really motivating. Woo!