A Look Back at the Year by the Numbers

There is no reason for me to do a retrospective of the big things in my year. My blog serves as the daily diary of big and small things that happened. Instead I decided today to enter all my data from my fit bit into a spread sheet and see how I did no my one big goal of 2014 – to walk 20,000 steps a day. Now in all honesty I did not make that my goal until the end of January, but that hardly makes a difference.

I walked t total of 6,006277 steps that were counted when I wore my fitbit, in 2014. I almost always had it one and only once or twice was it uncharged, so over six million is fairly accurate. My numbers say that I walked a total of 2627 miles.

Sounds like a lot, but it is no even close to reaching my goal. I average 16,455 steps a day so I was just over 80% of the way there. That meant I walked an average of 7.2 miles a day. Only in the month of February did I actually walk an average that was over 20,000 steps a day.

I started the year 22 pounds heavier than I got at my lowest point. If you are reading between the lines you can figure out that I gained weight at the end of the year. I tried a terrible experiment of letting myself eat whatever I wanted between Thanksgiving and Christmas and walking just as much as I wanted to see what would happen. Eight pounds is what happened and an average of only walking 10,000 steps a day.

That experiment is officially over. I started eating like a judge a couple of days ago and today will be the first day I will get my 20,000 steps in, thanks to lots of time doing spread sheets to see how badly things can go when I am not vigilant.

My new goal is to do 20,000 steps a day as an average in each month. That means that if I am going on vacation and know I will be sitting on a plane, unallowed to get up and roam the aisle I am going to have to bank steps in advance. If I am sick one day I will have to make it up in the next couple. If I have an all day meeting I will have to stay on my treadmill later into the night.

I also am going to keep my spreadsheet as I go along and not have one big data dump day. This way I can track in real time. I know that I am not a person who can eat holiday food without consequence. I also know that I need to keep moving if I am to lose even eight pounds. No fun, no fair, tough luck, that’s me.

So Happy New Year to you and yours. I hope that holiday eating and sitting around did not do to you what it did not me. I know that most of the world will be on some sort of diet come tomorrow. Welcome to my life, as I should live it. Not living clean is clearly not an option. Hopefully it won’t take me longer than it took me to put it on to get it off.