The PhD writeup diet

The idea was to use the process of writing up a PhD to also lose weight and increase fitness. The diet/writing started at the end of April 2006 (day 0). Below are two graphs showing the progress of the diet and the PhD thesis.

This first graph records weight measured during the writeup process. Body weight is being used as a simple indication of the progress of the diet and fitness training. The red line is a 7 day moving-window average (trend line). The predicted dates for weight loss use linear regression. The goal was to achieve the target weight of 12 stone before the submission of the PhD thesis. I passed the target weight on day 95, the plan was to continue to update the graph until the thesis was submitted.

Turns out the last few weeks are missing from the graphs because it all got a bit crazy towards the end, the thesis was submitted on 02-Oct-2006.

This graph shows the number of new words written per day as an indication of progress for the PhD thesis. Diagrams and references are included in the word count using score of 200 for a picture and 25 for a complete reference added to the BibTex database. The graph obviously only shows a subset of the work performed when writing up a PhD and does not record time spent refactoring drafts so it is not completely representative of the total effort expended and progress made.