Four Years+ of BodyMedia Data

Yesterday afternoon I did the next run on my training schedule.  Fortunately I found out that the manufacturer will replace my treadmill belt under warranty, so I could cut off the little ripped part and use my own treadmill.  I ran for 40 min and increased my speed from 5.8 mph to 6.2 mph to average 6mph.  The total distance was 4.0 mi.  This run didn't feel as bad as I expected, because I was still (and am still) quite sore from Legs & Back on Monday morning.  I walked an extra 10 min on the treadmill since we'd had a snow day, and I was home all day hardly moving.

This morning I did Insanity the Aslyum vol. 2 Agility Tutorial, followed by Pure Contact.  This worked up a good sweat.  My Basis Peak said I burned about 190 cal.

Today I took a look at all of the BodyMedia data I accumulated over more than four years: 1520 days of data.  I was interested to look at trends of weight gain/loss with my calorie burn and intake.  Well, unfortunately I did not find anything helpful.  Here's a screenshot of two key graphs:

The top graph shows the difference between the calories I burned (according to BodyMedia) and the calories I ate.  A positive number means that I burned more than I ate.  This is plotted over time.  The second graph shows my weight over time. 

As you can see, my weight has been gradually increasing.  Some of this increase is good: it's muscle.  I know this by correlating my waist circumference with it.  However, some of it is definitely fat gain.  Interestingly, over more than four years, I have not been in a weight maintenance mode for long at all - I'm either gaining or losing.  I was maintaining for awhile at about 1/4 of the way from the left of the graph, which is the fall of 2011, but that's about it. 

However, comparing the graphs doesn't give me much insight into why I'm gaining or losing.  I feel like a lot of the peaks and troughs in my weight graph are also mirrored in the calorie difference graph, which doesn't make much sense to me.

In this image, the top graph is the calories I ate per day graphed over time, and the bottom graph is again my weight over time.  Again, I am not seeing much pattern here.  After the maintenance weight part of the graph, I lost a little bit.  As you can see, my average calorie intake was not extraordinariily low.  Later, at about halfway through the graph, when I was also losing weight, I had some lower calorie days, but not exclusively - this was when I was zig-zagging my calories.  At about 3/4 through the graph, when I was also losing weight, my calorie intake was not the lowest.  The last part of the graph, from the highest weight to the end is my weight since my vacation this past August.  As you can see, I've hardly lost any of that weight, even though I'm eating some of the consistently lowest calories in the whole record.

Maybe that means that I should be eating a little more to try to lose that weight?  It's very frustrating.