At the moment I'm on a training and weight-loss programme to get fit and lose weight for next season. The beginning of this year was mostly spent in convalescence after quite a serious spell in hospital which amounted to over 3 months away from training. This, of course, takes its toll and while I was a healthy weight to enable me to recover well it meant I was overweight when trying to climb mountains on a bicycle. I have a sack of chickpeas in my house which weighs 14kg and it's really super-heavy to pick up, yet the extra weight I'm carrying is more than this! If I was asked to carry that sack of chickpeas up a mountain with me, I'd say that I wouldn't be able to—but that's effectively what I am doing...it's all power to weight, huh.
My target is to lose 17kg over the next few months by balancing my activity and calorie input. To help me do this I bought some Fitbit Aira weight scales which connect to my Fitbit account and upload my daily weight measurements directly to my account. In fact they just emailed me yesterday morning to say congratulations for losing 3kg—which was nice of them! I'm also using a Fitbit Flex wristband which tracks my movement through the day—outside of training—and it also tracks my sleep by detecting any movements I make through the night, interpreting them as 'restless' periods. In fact it is this data that's allowed me to tune my sleep patterns in a really positive way recently. I'm often aware that on a Friday evening I'm woken up by housemates but I just turn over and go back to sleep. Often I'm super-tired on Saturday mornings when I get up for my club ride but just put this down to it being the end of the week. But even going to sleep early on Friday wasn't giving me the rest I seemed to need. But by checking the 'times awake' stats from my Fitbit account showed that I was awake during the night hugely more on a Friday evening than any other evening so checking my sleep pattern from one Friday revealed more detail.
Turns out I was being woken up around every 20 minutes until 3 or 4am, then I was getting up at 6am to ride my bike—but I'd not really had any good sleep through the night. Realising this I spoke to my housemates and we sorted the problem by putting some foam dots on their doorframe so the noise wouldn't keep waking me up as they closed the door. Turns out that was exactly the issue and now I sleep really well on Friday evenings, waking up feeling well rested on Saturday morning.
Another really interesting graph is my 'activity' from last Saturday which can tell the story of my day. I was up around 6am and pottered around making breakfast and having a shower etc. Then I rode to the station and got the train out of central London (which you can see as a period of inactivity as I sat on the train). I then rode to a cafe to meet my club and sat and had a coffee (another period of inactivity). We then had a 70km ride, which shows up as the big chunk of green high-activity. I then had a coffee and then rode home (which is the next, yellow peak). After that I pottered around making some food and having a shower but by around 3:30pm I was tired so I had a nap on the sofa which turned into around an hour's sleep. After that I made dinner and got ready for a night out, walking to the pub at around 8:20pm (the first thin green lines). Then my activity was lower as I sat around chatting in the pub with my friends. Then there are some more green lines of activity as I walked home from the pub again and went to bed.
I've also been able to see an interesting pattern with my weight-loss too. It seems I have a greater loss on Wednesdays than any other day in the week.
I wasn't sure why that would be, but checking my activity over the weekend it's clear I spend much more time in intense activity such as fast cycling, so my calorie intake goes up slightly. Mondays, by comparison, tend to be a more inactive day so I eat less and this pushes my weight-loss along a little bit.
It's definitely really interesting to be capturing this data and over time it really exposes patterns in your lifestyle, allowing you to fine-tune your activities and food etc to really plan out what weight you want to be and where you want to be in terms of fitness. I'd love it if my Strava runs and rides were synced to Fitbit automatically but for now I have to do this manually—hopefully this is coming soon though!