Trendsetting

The following post is dedicated to HSR, connoisseur

of scrupulous data analysis and presentation

I am interrupting my regularly-scheduled broadcast in order to pause, take a breath, and review my progress thus far. I have been in a state of gluten-freedom for exactly one month and I thought it might be a good idea to take stock of my ups and downs and assess my situation. The past four weeks have been punctuated by a few metaphorical zeniths and nadirs, with several small victories and setbacks in between - making it difficult for me to evaluate my state-of-being and degree of optimism from one day to the next. For example, on Saturday, I was feeling not a little triumphant after my gluten-free profiterole-ending gala dinner, only to have my elation on Tuesday punctured like so many pigs' bladders by news I cannot yet bring myself to relate (anxious readers must wait until my next instalment to discover the nature of the latest calamity). It has made for a very confusing time.

Since I am, at heart, a systematic sort of gal, I decided to plot the major gluten-related events of the last 31 days on an Excel spreadsheet for ease of analysis; reasoning that empirical data often prove efficacious when emotions start to get in the way of clear thinking. My precious Moleskine notebook proved an invaluable resource in this regard, its detail-filled pages enabling me to produce with ease the following scatter graph. It is, I trust readers will agree, self-explanatory. The x-axis represents my gluten-free days to date, helpfully labelled 1 thru 31. The y-axis is a scale of my happiness index, where [-1.0] is the black sucking pit of despair and [+1.0] is the light at the end of the tunnel (zero represents either mental equilibrium or stunned inactivity, depending on your point of view).  It became a simple matter to plot significant gluten-related occurrences, as can be seen below (click to view in full splendor):

Taking Stock: scatter plot of my
first gluten-free month


A cursory perusal revealed an alarming randomness in the data - a lot of noise from which it was difficult to draw meaningful conclusions. Fortunately, the good people at Microsoft have endowed Excel with a number of handy line-fits and trend analyses to ease the way. First, I tried a polynomial fit, which ASTM  recommends for all manner of data massaging. I chose a bold red and added an arrow to the end of the line, endowing it with a vibrant sense of forward motion and accomplishment:

Taking Stock: Polynomial fit

I was recompensed with a lissome swoopy curve, but I did not care at all for the sudden death-leap at the end. I found this analysis ultimately doom-laden and depressing, and decided to try another. Perhaps a simple moving average would be more to my liking (represented by the blue dotted line, below):

Taking Stock: Rolling average


My jump off the cliff became more a hop off the curb, and I thought I detected a rising trend, but that final blue arrow was still pointing south in a disturbing fashion - not the note on which I wanted to end my month. I finally decided to overlay a straight-line fit, last resort of the desperate:

Taking Stock: Straight line fit

Voila! A reassuring, upwardly-mobile trend, clearly shown for the world to see!  My happy green line and jubilantly upward-pointing arrow prove that I am making excellent progress and have not a care in the world. Even in the face of my new grief, I can be statistically assured that all is for the best in this best of all possible gluten-free worlds.

Next up: I vow to face my next disaster with equanimity and joie de vivre, a bounce in my step and my head held high. It's already too late for my Day 31 cataclysm, more about which I shall soon reveal.