Time for everyone's favorite activity: using random poorly designed calculations to draw conclusions about the cause and effect relationship between working out and losing weight. Today's subject: Adrienne.
To start, I took all of the data Adrienne has ever submitted to 2 Fat nerds. This includes 147 workouts and 87 weight measurements. What I wanted to look at is if there was a relationship between the amount of AFP she earns in a week, and what type of weight measurement she would post during that week. Honestly, I've done this sort of comparison on my own data in the past, and I didn't see much of a direct relationship. There are so many variables that come into play, like how many times you go out to dinner, what you eat, if your family is in town, if its christmas etc. It is hard to really see a great trend, but nevertheless, lets look at Adrienne's data.
x-axis: Week, y-primary: Weight in lbs, y-seconday: weekly afp total.
I started by combining all of her entries into weekly totals. For AFP, I took a simple summation of all points earned in the given week. For her weight, I took an average across all entries in that given week. Plotting the total points in blue, you can see her periods of activity and inactivity rather clearly. She has become significantly more reliable since December 2012, and you see that in her average weight decline. I added two trend lines to show her data more clearly.
You can see a relationship between her increased activity and a general decline in weight toward the end of August and into september, though her inactivity in October and November directly related to an increase in weight those corresponding months. Come the end of November there is a nice decline once again, but you can see the Holiday spike pretty clearly. As mentioned above, she's been working very hard in the new year, and she has shown good results thus far.
Though the direct correlation value is fairly modest at a value of .43, I don't believe that is that horrible, because of the number of random variables present. I guess, through all of this screwy math and random biases, I am able to see the trend I set out to see . . . if that isn't science, I don't know what is. Moral of the story, keep it up Adrienne, that whack-ass-graph says if you exercise, good things will happen.
I prefer to think that I defy science, but I guess this is the evidence that if I keep doing what I’m doing, I will lose weight. I only feel a little singled-out.
No where to hide!
Stacked graphs give me goosebumps.
::hyena shake:: post it againnn!
Hey – Is there any correlation on the graph to the mindset that I exercised, therefore I can get away with eating more? But unfortunately the scale does not lie and you really do need both components. Not to single you out ADN, but it seemed that way early on in Jon’s table unless I am looking at it wrong. Just curious. Keep up the good work, you are awesome! And looking at the Boston weather report, you may be able to get some AFPs skiing to work!