With a wedding and honeymoon now out of the way it’s time to get back to being serious about my fitness levels again.  Yes, I was able to not go totally off the rails over the last few months but I had a bit of a fitness deficit to work out of to begin with.  All of the excuses, legitimate or otherwise, are now gone.  No, I’m not going to do an experiment.  No, I’m not going to be targeting some specific weight loss, muscle increase, or performance goals.  I’m instead taking the tools that I’ve applied to those sorts of expeditions and applying that to a more general concept.

In the end of 2010 I started tracking all of my nutrition, daily calorie burning, and moods full time.  Years of doing it off and on during 12-week fitness challenges, weight loss periods, et cetera prepared me well for this process and made it second nature.  Now it’s coming up on the end of 2016 and I have pretty much everything I’ve eaten, my daily calorie burn estimates, and my moods tracked for several years.  The problem is that the platform I had tracked it in, FitDay, is all but defunct.  How will I resurrect that data?

A few years ago after yet another one of those hacker scares of compromised browsers and operating systems I decided to get a bit dramatic and stop working primarily on my computer’s host operating system and instead run everything I could inside of virtual machines.  VirtualBox has always been my tried and true technology, but in recent months it has suffered a huge plague of major stability problems across all of my host operating systems.  These are problems I’ve never had under VirtualBox 4.  The 3D drivers seem to get more and more unstable with each subsequent upgrade of Windows or MacOS.  Chrome/Chromium/Electron applications that used to run okay now are display artifact hell.  With the latest batch of updates audio drivers keep failing, as well as the 3D drivers.

I’m reading this article on a proposed new law that would make it illegal to put your child on a vegan diet.  The law itself sounds a bit heavy handed, but after a few well publicized cases of parents showing up to the hospital with very malnourished children, and one of them even dying , it wasn’t happening in isolation. These were obvious cases of parents not making sure their child’s diet was working for them.  They were doing very egregious things like giving a six week old nothing but soy milk and juice.  I’m not a doctor or a parent, but even I know that doesn’t make sense.  In the article comments on ArsTechnica one of the commentators stated, “If you have a non vegan diet, you can live exclusively off potatoes and milk. Not the best diet, but it’s livable and you get most of the vitamins and nutrients you need.”  I thought to myself, “I don’t think that’s correct.”  So, I went to figure out if it was true…

A documentary on Biosphere 2’s doctor Roy Walford introduced me to the concept of being able to finely track all macro/micro nutrients in the 1990s, but at the cost of hundreds of dollars.  A few years later, around 2001/2002 I was able to start doing the same thing With FitDay.com and then later with their PC equivalent.  In recent years their platform has stagnated and the PC-to-Website integration has totally broken.  I ran across a website called CRON-O-Meter that at first glance seemed like FitDay on steroids, and boy is it!

I’ve had the pleasure of spending the last couple of weeks replacing my FitBit Charge HR with a new Garmin Vivoactive HR.  While the Charge HR suited most of my needs it wasn’t quite 100% of the way there.  I still needed a GPS watch for runs, which I could have accomplished by staying in the FitBit universe with the Surge though.  I also wanted to start tracking swimming, which the Surge wouldn’t have accomplished.  But would I be trading one set of problems for another?  Here’s the good, not-so-good, bad, and ugly of my experiences with the Vivoactive HR.