[smontanaro]

A few things have occurred to me over the past couple weeks as I've been logging accusations from my scale about my fitness.

• Salt intake matters. A lot. I can generally tell when I've consumed more than my fair share of NaCl. As my wife is a vegetarian and I generally consume a "meat light" diet, excess salt usually comes in the form of highly processed or restaurant food. When that happens, I suck down water light I'm anticipating a drought, generally without letting much go (sort of like I'm a reservoir – my apologies for making light of the folks on the West Coast suffering with atmospheric rivers). My weight spikes and takes a couple days to regress to the mean.
  
• Beware the slimmed down clothes. My wife is an expert with a sewing machine and recently resized a number of t-shirts which fit like tents. Now they fit like they are supposed to, which means I have no room to grow. This is good, right?
  
• Weight training messes with simple single-axis fitness measures. Clearly, considering just weight as a measure of progress isn't ideal anyway, but still, it's convenient. I started stretching routinely about two years ago, and over time have added weight exercises I can easily do in the house, the usual: planks, push-ups, curls, etc. I've always had a twig-like upper body. I still do, but the twigs are now a bit bigger, and I just know there's a six pack hiding under the excess fat I'm carrying around my middle. I don't know how much muscle weight I've added, but it interferes with simple attempts to measure rprogress by weight on the scale. I have no convenient way to measure my body fat percentage, so I guess I'll just have to go by what the mirror and the fit of my clothing say, and not worry too much about my stated end goal.