Using R for the First Time in Awhile

I’ve been logging my weight daily in a notepad file on my phone. I started at the end of January, and it’s the 1st of the month, so I thought I’d take February’s data and see what I could make of it in R (a statistics language). I opened up R, loaded my weight readings for February as a data frame, and fit a linear model.

According to the model there’s no statistically significant association between the day of the month and my weight. Which means I neither gained nor lost weight in Feb. Due to a scale of questionable reliability, the readings are all over the place. Without statistics software I couldn’t’ve determined that on my own, honestly. (I wouldn’t mind losing weight but my goal was just to stay under 200lb, which I did.)

It’s interesting to use R against for the first time in awhile. I likely could have accomplished the same goals in python if I dug up the right libraries. (The code would likely have been more readable.) But linear model fitting is hello-world-level functionality in R.

1 March 2023