One of the wonderful assets at my excellent local gym – The Barn Fitness Club in Cholsey – is that they have a Boditrax machine. This looks like a pair of bathroom scales with metal plates where you put your feet, hooked up to a PC. It bounces a small charge through one foot and measures the signal that comes back through the other. Measuring your weight at the same time and having previously been told your age, it can then work out the composition of your body in terms of fat, muscle, water and bone. The results are dropped on the Boditrax web site, where you can monitor your progress.

For the last 12 weeks, the gym has run a 12 week Boditrax challenge. Fortunately, I pay James Fletcher for a monthly Personal Training session there, where he takes readings using this machine and adjusts my 3x per week gym routine accordingly. The end results after 12 weeks have been (top  graph my weight progress, the bottom my composition changes):

The one difference from previous weight loss programmes i’ve followed is the amount of weight work i’d been given this time around. I used to be always warned that muscle weighs considerably more than fat, so to try to keep to cardio work to minimise both. The thinking these days appears to be to increase your muscle mass a little, which increases your metabolic rate – to burn more calories, even at standstill.

The one thing i’ve done since June 3rd 2002 is to tap my food intake and exercise daily into the excellent Weight Loss Resources web site. Hence I have a 12 year history of exact figures for fat, carbs and protein intake, weight and corresponding weight changes throughout. I used these in a recent Google Course on “Making sense of Data”, which used Google Fusion tables, trying to spot what factors led to a consistent 2lbs/week weight loss.

There are still elements of the storyboard I still need to fit in to complete the picture, as Fusion Tables can draw a scatter plot okay, but can’t throw a weighted trend line through that cloud of data points. This would give me a set of definitive stories to recite; what appears so far is that I make sustainable 2lbs/week losses below a specific daily calorie value if I keep my carbs intake down at a specific level at the same time. At the moment, i’m tracking at around 1lb/week, which is half the rate I managed back in 2002-3 – so i’m keen to expose the exact numbers I need to follow. Too much, no loss; too little, body goes into a siege mentality – and hence the need for a happy medium.

I tried to get a final fix on the exact nett intake and carb levels in Google Spreadsheets, which isn’t so adept at picking data subsets with filters – so you end up having the create a spreadsheet for each “I wonder if” question. So, i’ve largely given up on that until I can get my mits on a Mac version of Tableau Desktop Professional, or can rent a Windows Virtual Desktop on AWS for $30 for 30 days to do the same on it’s Windows version. Until then, I can see the general picture, but there are probably many data points from my 3,800+ weeks of sampled data that plot on top of each other – hence the need for the weighted trend line in order to expose the definitive truth.

The nice thing about the Boditrax machine is that it knows your Muscle and Fat composition, so can give you an accurate reading for your BMR – your Basal Metabolic Rate. This is the minimum level of energy your body needs when at rest to function effectively including your respiratory and circulatory organs, neural system, liver, kidneys, and other organs. This is typically circa 70% of your daily calorie intake, the balance used to power you along.

My BMR according to the standard calculation method (which assumes a ‘typical’ %muscle content) runs about 30 kcals under what Boditrax says it actually is. So, I burn an additional 30 Kcals/day due to my increased muscle composition since James Fletchers training went into place.

Still a long way to go, but heading in the correct direction. All I need now is that copy of Tableau Desktop Professional so that I can work out the optimum levels of calorie and carbs intake to maximise the long term, relentless loss – and to ensure I track at those levels. In the meantime, i’ll use the best case I can work out from visual inspection of the scatter plots.

I thoroughly recommend the Barn Fitness Club in Cholsey, use of their Boditrax machine and regular air time with any of their Personal Trainers. The Boditrax is only £5/reading (normally every two weeks) and an excellent aid to help achieve your fitness goals.

Just waiting to hear the final result of the 12 week Boditrax challenge at the Club – and to hope i’ve done enough to avoid getting the wooden spoon!

In the meantime, it’s notable that my approx nett calorie intake level (calories eaten less exercise calories) to lose 2lbs/week appears to be my current BMR – which sort of suggests the usual routine daily activity I don’t log (walking around the home, work or shops) is sufficient to hit the fat reserves. An hour of time with Tableau on my data should be enough to confirm if that is demonstrably the case, and the level of carbs I need to keep to in order to make 2lbs/week a relentless loss trend again.