Needing to find some balance

 Since I got my new planner I have not written in here as much and that makes me sad. I love writing in here because it's like free form thinking and sometimes things show up that I'm not even aware of. I think I'm going to start doing my planner at night and doing this in the morning again. I find a real difference in my mental state when I write in here. 

Which leads me to a topic that has been floating around my mind the past couple of days. I've been weighing myself fairly regularly for a while now. I do it for a number of reasons, but that main one is that knowledge is power. If I see the scale creeping up I can look at what I'm doing and see if there is something different. Also, I just find that when I'm aware of the number I tend to do better. The number doesn't get me down at all because I know that so many, many things influence it. Which leads me to what I'm thinking about. That number on the scale is really just a relative number and not an exact measurement. Let me explain. Many things affect weight; salt, water, humidity, exercise, etc. And these things can change from one day to the next and sometimes from one minute to the next. So getting a real, true weight is almost impossible. But what the scale is good for is relative weight. So if I weigh 215 today and then tomorrow it's 217, I know logically that I did not 'gain' 2 pounds in one day, but clearly something affected my body composition. That is knowledge and something that I can work with. 

I recently, 3 days ago, got a new scale. This is so high tech that it's scary. It links to an app on my phone and it measures all sorts of metrics; body fat, water, muscle, bone, visceral fat, internal fat, etc. I get like 13 data points every time I step on it. This is more knowledge, more information to work with and the reason I realized it's all relative. On my other scale I was weighing in at 213, on this one it's 217. I'm confident that I did not gain 4 pounds walking from one room to the next, so it's the device I'm using and therefore a relative measure. The same with my Whoop band. It just provides me more information that is relative to me, but I can use to make informed decisions about what I do to my body. So my Whoop has now given me enough of a baseline that I can start playing with the information. The scale is still new. Also, I need to track my food intake and I mean seriously track it. If these data points are going to help me inform my health, I need to have relatively accurate data. 

I'm thinking that I need to bring all this information together. Maybe I'll create a spreadsheet that I can update once a week or so and see what trends are happening. I'll need to think on that and nothing is starting until after next week. The 26th is the last day of school and after that everything changes.