weight — 24 things I got wrong before I got it right
Something I keep coming back to: weight — 24 things I got wrong before I got it right.
Annotated the fortnight I changed training. Without that note the numbers around it would look like a mystery.
The attribution problem, which is the reason most logs on this board cannot answer the question their owner is asking.
If dose, training, intake and sleep all changed in the same fortnight, no analysis of the resulting numbers can tell you which one moved the outcome. That is not a limitation of your spreadsheet; it is a limitation of the design.
The fix is unglamorous: change one thing at a time, leave it long enough to see, and annotate the weeks where something else intruded anyway — because life will intrude. A log with honest annotations answers questions. A log with four simultaneous changes and a confident conclusion is the most common thing posted here, and it does not.
Why contemporaneous beats reconstructed, with the failure mode.
Memory smooths. Reconstructing a fortnight from recollection produces a series that is more regular, more consistent with your current beliefs, and quietly wrong in a direction that flatters the story you are already telling.
I found this out by reconstructing six weeks and later finding order receipts that contradicted my own entries. The log was not a little wrong; it was wrong in exactly the direction that made my narrative work. Write it down on the day, even the boring days, especially the boring days.
Screenshot none of this. Read the whole thread, including the parts where I am told I am wrong.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
Built an elaborate spreadsheet, abandoned it by week nine, restarted with four columns and have kept it ever since.
waist monthly, weight weekly, notes whenever
What are you actually recording each week?
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.
Attribution requires that one thing change at a time. A log with dose, training and intake all moving in the same fortnight cannot assign anything to any of them.
How long have you been logging?
This. Annotating the weeks where something else changed is what makes the log interpretable later.
I would not draw a trend line through that. Two points and a gap is not a series.
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.
Annotation is what makes a log survive contact with your future self. A single note beside an unusual week saves an hour of puzzled reconstruction later.
A log is a record of what you did. It is not a protocol, and posting one as a schedule for other members is a different thing that this board does not do.
Left up. Dates, consistent conditions and annotations, which is the standard here.
Missing entries recorded as blanks preserve the shape of the series. Dropping them silently makes the remaining points look more regular than they were.