The quote in the title is about assessment -- that testing by itself doesn't cause improvement unless you use the numbers to guide changes in what you do. (Think about all the school testing we do, for example. We don't use those test results to help us fix schools, just to justify not funding them adequately).

I use it here to remind myself that seeing the numbers I saw on my new body fat scale did not make me fatter. I am not going to post those numbers here, because whenever I post numbers, I find that they just give people something else to feel bad about (sort of like buying a body fat scale) if their numbers aren't as good as mine. What upsets me is that given these numbers, my weight goal of 155 is not low enough to get to a healthy body fat percentage. And I haven't made great strides in even getting to that apparently inadequate number. I have been playing around with 5 pounds for, oh, 2 years now. Suffice it to say that my body fat range puts me in the high end of "overfat" when the numbers on the picture here would be more where I probably should be.

I weighed myself on my old scale and the new one just to check the accuracy, and I do weigh slightly less (0.7 pounds) on the new one -- but it's close enough to the same to be meaningless. I am just going to shift over to the new scale and not keep using the old one, because I think that would make me crazier than I already am. I will continue to use my Monday morning weigh-ins as the "official" one.

So back to my opening paragraph -- testing itself doesn't create improvement. You need to do something about the numbers. Increasing my strength training, for example, to bump up my lean body mass. Continuing to work on decreasing my calories so that I can use some of this stored energy would be another good step.

I also think I'm going to see if my doctor will give me a referral for allergy testing. I felt pretty crummy when we got a slight thaw -- whatever I'm allergic to must have thawed out. It's colder again and I feel slightly better. Knowing what allergies I have may help me have more energy if I can find ways to avoid the allergens. Someone here posted that they had a thyroid problem that was made worse by a gluten sensitivity. I wonder if something like that might be going on with me as well. I need to figure out what is sapping my energy all the time.

I had a dream last night that I went running. Can you tell I miss it? But at the same time, I'm not sure I would have the energy for it now anyway.