Hello everyone, it is Laurence! In addition to the scientific study, I will be the one who compiles the weekly stats and show them to you. For the first week, I did a quick overview of the composition of the sample and showed you guys what kind of goals and means to achieve them we have taken as a group.

Description of the sample

For this round, we have a total of 256 participants, 64.2% of which are women.  The average participant is almost 27 years old, 172.85 cm (5’7”) and weights 85.6kg (188.32lbs).

Currently, only around half of the participants have calculated their body fat percentage, which is in average 30.93%. Those who have calculated their body fat percentage do not have a higher BMI than the rest of the group so there is no reason to think this percentage is not representative. The four graphs bellow are displaying data by sex for, respectively, age, weight in kilograms, BMI and body fat percentage.

Weight objectives & BMI information

Everyone’s objective is quite different, it ranges from losing 25kg (55lbs) to gaining 18kg (39.6lbs) but in average, participants want to lose 7.86kg (17.29lbs). I will try never to use BMI in individual analysis since it was meant to be used as a population measure. As a sample, we are overweight with an average BMI of 28.48 and if everything goes as planned for everyone (and we hope it does) we will move to the edge of being at a normal weight with an average BMI of 25.85.

Goals, Diets and Exercise

The next table shows the goals we have set for ourselves during the next round. In average, each participant has set 3.4 goals. Most of us want to lose weight, reduce our body fat percentage and improve our strength, endurance and measurements.

As for diet followed by participants, we can see that the more popular diet will be a small calorie deficit. Our friends from r/keto and r/paleo are also well represented in the distribution and there is a good proportion following low-carb/high-protein diets. There is also a large proportion of participants that won’t follow any specific diet.

An average of 2.67 types of physical activity will be undertaken by participants. I also did a similar table to see in which ways we are going to get moving in the next three months.

Most of you guys who track your food intake use MyFitnessPal but there is also a large proportion of people who prefers not to monitor what they eat.

I also tried a few exploratory analysis and the only thing that came out as significant was a weak but negative correlation between the weight loss objective and the number of physical activities that participants want to engage in. As weird as it may seem, it means that the more weight you want to lose, the fewer types of physical activities you undertake. It doesn’t mean that participants who want to lose a lot of weight won’t do a lot of physical activity; it just means that these folks seem to engage in a smaller variety of physical activity.

As the round unfolds, I will be able to tell you which kind of goal, exercise, tracker, diet is the more efficient in order to stay on track or even to attain different goals. I look forward to tell you if any of the groups do better than the others during the round! By the way guys, pleeeease, try to get your units right… I’ve had 62cm folks that weighted 150kg… I honestly hope it was a mistake… If you guys have any question regarding the signup questionnaire, or the data I presented here, feel free to ask!

By the way, there are still a few days left to enter the study if ever you are interested! https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/exerciseprofile