This is a personal story of weight loss with JASP, featuring my non-patented miracle fun diet. In recent years, I found myself in the following circumstances:
- I tend to spend most of my days crouched behind a computer.
- Lower back pain prevents me from exercising (or at least from doing the kind of exercise that I am willing to commit to, like playing squash).
- In the evenings, I like to snack (e.g., potato chips, cheeses, meats) and drink alcohol.
- I am now 52 years old, and my metabolism is different from when I was 25.
Together, these factors have caused me to gain some unwanted weight, and I decided some of it needed shedding. Of course I could go on a diet and count calories, or avoid certain food groups altogether. But this is not how I wish to live my life, and the prospect of never again enjoying a glass of wine or a bag of chips was unacceptable to me. I also didn’t want to relapse after a few months because the diet is so strict that I cannot stick with it. In other words, I needed a simple, effective diet that allows occasional snacking without the danger of relapsing and giving up on the diet altogether. I needed a miracle fun diet.
The JASP Quality Control Miracle Fun Diet: Preparations
The JASP quality control miracle fun diet is loosely inspired by methods used in the manufacturing industry to ensure that their products are “in spec”, that is, that their quality characteristics fall inside their specification limits, which means that the product is not defective and meets its requirements. In preparation for the diet itself, two steps are essential:
- You need to have a reliable scale for measuring your weight. I use an electronic scale, but I find that it is erratic — I use an old-fashioned analogue scale to confirm that the values from the electronic scale are not wildly off. Clearly this is not optimal. Make sure you have a reliable scale or else it will take the fun out of the miracle fun diet. Also, there is no need to overcomplicate things and use a scale that measures many different variables. For me, weight was the only variable that mattered.
- You need to set a (realistic) target interval on your weight. It is important to specify an interval and not a single point. I set my target interval from 72 to 74 kilos (that is, 159 to 163 pounds). The benefit of specifying an interval over a point is that you can control your weight to remain within the interval, and small weight gains –due to attending a few parties, a visit to an all-you-can-eat restaurant, consumption of a bottle of wine– are OK, just as long as you stay within your interval. If you want to lose a lot of weight you can do this in stages, where you first specify an initial target interval and then, after you’ve reached your initial goal, you can set a more ambitious target interval.
“Don’t Eat Crap”
With the scale in hand and the target interval specified, we are ready to apply the diet itself. Below are the guidelines that I used. If you wish to try a similar diet, be sure to tailor the rules to your own needs and wants. I am not a medical doctor and this is not medical advice. That said, I am sure that the medical profession would wholeheartedly support the main tenet of the diet. Articulated succinctly by my former squash coach Aisling Blake, the main tenet is this: “don’t eat crap”. Here are the rules I applied:
- No snacking.
- No alcohol unless I am attending a party or we have guests over.
- Lunch is modest, about half of what I would eat without being on the miracle fun diet.
- I measure my weight every single day in the morning just before I have breakfast.
- I write down my weight and enter it in JASP. This allows me to track my progress and control my weight. Below are my results for the first 43 days of being on the miracle fun diet:
As the graph showed, I dropped about one kilo (2.2 pounds) per week. When my weight is in the control region, the values turn blue. On day 29 I was out of town and without access to a scale, so there is a missing value there. Note that the target interval from 72 to 74 kilo provides sufficient room for occassional excesses. I also recommend to share the weight-loss graph with a friend, as the peer pressure will provide additional motivation to lose the weight and then keep it under control.
Track and Control Your Own Weight With JASP
You may feel inspired to give the JASP quality control miracle fun diet a shot yourself. It is simple to produce the kind of weight-loss graph shown above. Here is how to do it. First you download and install JASP (reminder: JASP is open-source and 100% free). Then you open the program and select “New Data” from the ribbon. You will need to create one column that has the date of your measurements and one column that has your weight. You can see an example in the screenshot below:
It is important that the “date” information is entered in a specific format. In this case, I used YYYY-MM-DD. With the data entered, you press “Analyses” on the ribbon and then create the desired graph by navigating to the blue + sign in the top right of the JASP screen. This shows the modules menu; you need to tick the box for Predictive Analytics. Having ticked this box, the corresponding icon becomes available in the ribbon. Click on the icon to activate the GUI for Predictive Analytics. Drag the weight column into the “Dependent Variable” box and the date column into the “Time” box, as shown in the screenshot below.
When you open the expander for “Time Series Descriptives”, this allows you to define your target interval — as you can see, mine is set at a mean of 73 and ranges from 72 to 74. You can tinker with the options at will. Below is a screenshot that shows the data spreadsheet (leftmost panel), the input GUI (middle panel) and the output (rightmost panel). One you have created the initial graph it will automatically update as you add new measurements.
In the future I may construct a moving gif or a YouTube video that shows you how the weight-loss graph is produced, but JASP is pretty intuitive so hopefully you can figure this out by trial and error. Don’t forget to save your file regularly in case your computer should crash and you lose all of your data 🙂 Finally, I hope this post provides you with some inspiration. Control is essential for sustained weight loss, and control and measurement are like a horse and carriage. Do let me know if the JASP quality control miracle fun diet works for you!
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