1. Monday, 19 April, 11:00 pm, 165 pounds. Typical diurnal variation is approximately 2 pounds. Sunday, 26 June, 11:30 pm, last point at 167 pounds and last point more than 165 pounds. Wednesday, 30 June through 10 July was a vacation trip to Colorado. Food was all you can eat at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park. The end of the trip was marred by intestinal maladies, likely producing the overall weight loss and steady regain thereafter. Wale County Schools in North Carolina started the 2004-2005 school year on Wednesday, 11 August. A return to a more regular life routine facilitated a pronounced drop of approximately 2 pounds. Friday, 3 September, 7:00 am, new low at 158 pounds. Friday, 24 September, 6:45 am, 159 pounds. A flight that evening took me to Europe to teach a class. Four days in Paris and a return trip put me at 162 pounds, a gain of 3 pounds, on Wednesday, 29 September, 9:00 pm. “Three hundred twelve days of weighting” A chronicle of my body weight in pounds from Monday, 19 April 2004 through Thursday, 24 February 2005 Rafe Donahue, PhD Friday, 29 October, 7:15 am, new low at 157 pounds. Saturday, 30 October, 11:00 pm, 164 pounds, a gain of seven pounds in forty hours and the highest weight since 164 lbs on 17 August, 11:00 pm, six days after school started. A rockin’ 40 th birthday bash at the neighbor’s house is the likely culprit. Note the return to normalcy by Tuesday, 2 November. Thanksgiving, 11:00 pm, 164 pounds. Christmas, 11:30 pm, 164 pounds. First two weeks of December: a couple of out- of-town trips and lazy data collection. Sunday, 9 January, 1:00 am, one hour after the completion of my 40 th birthday, 161 pounds, a gain of 154 pounds over 40 years, a rate of only 3.85 pounds per year. At that rate, very crude and improper linear estimates have me surpassing 400 pounds on February 5 th, 2067, approximately 28 days after my 102 nd birthday! Monday, 7 February, 6:45 am, 158 pounds. Less than three hours later, our data mining department had been abolished. Five days later, a new record low at 152 pounds on Saturday, 12 February, 9:00 am. How much do you weigh? Every morning, after voiding, and every evening while doing bed preparations, if I remember, I step on the scale in the bathroom. Step on; step off; step on again and record the weight, rounded to the nearest pound, with time recorded to the nearest 15 minutes. My data log from April 2004 to February 2005 consists of 505 such time-and-weight records. Perhaps the most startling finding was the diurnal variation of nearly two pounds. Each point on the chart shows one weight reading. Time progresses left-to-right, with the left edge at Sunday, 18 April, midnight, and the right edge at Sunday, 27 February, midnight. The first actual reading was Monday, 19 April at 11:00 pm. The last reading was Thursday, 24 February at 7:15 am. The vertical demarcation lines show the weekly boundaries at midnights between Saturdays and Sundays. The smaller tick marks on the horizontal axis separate individual days. 2005.03.16.09.09