This is something that I have been working on in my spare time and I thought I should share it here before the next challenge starts in January.
tldr: I analyzed all of the 10 previous challenges and found that the average amount of weight lost during the challenges is 6 lbs. https://imgur.com/a/vtl5cTF
So far there have been 10 r/loseit challenges with 76 teams for those challenges.
| Challenge Name | Number of Participants who Finished |
|---|---|
| Spring Into Summer Challenge | 1063 |
| Mythical Creatures Spring Challenge | 1022 |
| Super Mario Brothers Super Challenge | 1013 |
| Super Hero Summer Challenge | 966 |
| Rebirth Challenge | 877 |
| New New Year New Goals Challenge | 860 |
| Lord Of The Rings Summer Challenge | 858 |
| The Summer Challenge | 791 |
| Sci-Fi Movies Challenge | 744 |
| Autumn Animal Challenge | 697 |
From participating in a few different challenges, I knew there are many people who have done multiple challenges. I wanted to begin by looking at how many have done more than one challenge, and who has participated in the most challenges. From the data we can see that there have been 1539 people who have participated in more than one challenge (and using the same username) and 4568 people who have only participated in a single challenge so far -- again this doesn't account for people who sign-up using multiple accounts.
Next, I wanted to look at the gender distribution of the participants. From the data it is obvious that loseit challenges have a very large gender imbalance. Around 71% of the participants in the challenges are women, 20% are male, 7% are unknown, and just under 1% of participants identify as other. Because there is such a large imbalance, for most of my analysis I will try and look at how the numbers vary between gender -- if they do at all.
Looking at the age distributions, we find that there is a large peak at the most common age 26. The oldest participant is 76 and the youngest has been 13. Looking the distributions separated by gender, we see that there us not a huge difference between them.
The average height is 66.5 in. With the shortest participant being 52.0 in and the tallest being 82.6 in. As we would expect, men have a higher average height than women do.
The average starting weight is 196.3 lbs. The highest starting weight so far has been 546.8 lbs. and the lowest has been 90.3 lbs. So really no matter how much you have to lose (or gain) these challenges are the place for you!
The average goal loss for the challenges is 10.0 lbs. This entry had a few outliers that are incorrect entries, so rather than using the mean for average, we use the median.
The average weight lost during the challenges is 6.0 lbs. The most weight lost during a challenge is 45.7 lbs.
In these plots we see that there is a slight correlation between starting BMI and the amount of weight that is lost during the challenges. This relationship seems independent of gender.
From these plots we see that giving a NSV, activity tracker, or food tracker does not have much of an affect of weight lost. One thing that I would be curious to see, is if the inter-team challenges/participation is correlated with weight loss.
Next, I wanted to look at how many people provide NSVs and links to activity and food trackers.
Has NSV: 78.82 %Gives activity tracker: 20.78 %Gives food tracker: 57.00 %No Info: 12.32%
Weight loss distributions separated by challenge and by team.
In this next section, we want to create a word cloud so that we can visualize some of the most common words that people use to describe their reasons for wanting to lose weight during r/loseit challenges.
A note about the analysis process. All of the data scraping and analysis was done using Python. To find the Google Sheets used for tracking during the challenges, I used PRAW to search through old r/loseit posts to find links to Google spreadsheets. I then used gspread to open and download the worksheet that contained the tracking data. The data was put into Pandas dataframes and missing data was either replaced using other information or dropped. Participants who missed the final weigh-in were dropped, unless they submitted a weigh-in for the previous week, which was then assumed to be their final weight. All of the plots were created using Seaborn and Matplotlib.
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from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2SjaACk
