weight — 23 things I got wrong before I got it right
Something I keep coming back to: weight — 23 things I got wrong before I got it right.
Built an elaborate spreadsheet, abandoned it by week nine, restarted with four columns and have kept it ever since.
Logged the missed weeks as blanks rather than skipping them. The gaps turned out to be the informative part.
Added a sleep column late and immediately understood two of my worst weeks.
Would rather be corrected in public than confident in private.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Choose a format you will still be able to open in two years. Plain text or a spreadsheet you export beats an application that may not exist.
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
Push back: a log with four variables changing at once cannot attribute anything to any of them.
Reconstructed six weeks from memory once and later found receipts that contradicted my own log. Never again.
Same conditions each time for the weigh-in?
log what you did, not what you meant to do
That is a waist figure in the weight column. Easy mistake and it makes the chart look dramatic.
export it somewhere you will still be able to read in two years
Annotated the fortnight I changed training. Without that note the numbers around it would look like a mystery.
the column you will wish you had is sleep
Disagree with daily weighing. You are logging fluid, and the emotional cost is real for very little information.
A log is only interpretable if the conditions are consistent. Same day, same time, same state, same scale — otherwise you are recording measurement variability rather than change.
A log is only interpretable if the conditions are consistent.
ahmed_abubakar is right about blanks. Silent gaps make the series lie.
Are the missed weeks in there as blanks or dropped entirely?
Small fix — that is a reconstructed entry rather than a contemporaneous one, and the post presents it as the latter.
Kept one line a week for 15 months. It was pointless for the first eight weeks and then it was the most useful document I owned.
Cosigning on missed weeks. Leaving them blank makes the whole series misleading.
Exported the whole thing to a plain text file after nearly losing it in an app that shut down.
Missing entries recorded as blanks preserve the shape of the series. Dropping them silently makes the remaining points look more regular than they were.
- 1Annotated the fortnight I changed training. Without that note the numbers…9 comments in this branch · started by u/line_bergstrom
- 2Push back: a log with four variables changing at once cannot attribute…6 comments in this branch · started by u/hugo_bergstrom