weight: the version I wish someone had shown me in week 1
weight: the version I wish someone had shown me in week 1. This is a description of what happened to me and not a plan for anybody else.
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.
The four columns that survive, after several people here have tried and abandoned much more elaborate systems.
Date. Dose. One number measured under consistent conditions. A short note when anything unusual happened. That is it. Anything more and you will stop, and a log you stop keeping is worth less than a crude one you maintain.
Add a waist measurement monthly if you can be bothered, and a sleep column if you want the one variable that explains the most confusing weeks. Everything else can be reconstructed from those, and nothing can be reconstructed from a log you abandoned in week nine.
Tell me where this is wrong. That is the useful part of posting it.
best — the order this archive was captured in
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.
Missing entries recorded as blanks preserve the shape of the series. Dropping them silently makes the remaining points look more regular than they were.
Are the missed weeks in there as blanks or dropped entirely?
What are you actually recording each week?
retrospective logs drift, contemporaneous ones do not
export it somewhere you will still be able to read in two years
Added the Log flair and a date range to the title so it is findable later.
Same conditions each time for the weigh-in?
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 23 months. It was pointless for the first eight weeks and then it was the most useful document I owned.
How long have you been logging?
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.
a log is not a plan and it is not advice for anybody else
That template is elaborate enough that you will stop using it by week ten. Mine was.
I would not draw a trend line through that. Two points and a gap is not a series.
I would not draw a trend line through that.
Disagreeing with this bit: daily weighing gives you noise and costs you something.
Agreed that consistent conditions matter more than frequency. Daily weights under varying conditions are noise.
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
What is the one column you added late and wish you had from the start?
Cosigning on missed weeks. Leaving them blank makes the whole series misleading.
nobody else needs your log to be pretty
Added a sleep column late and immediately understood two of my worst weeks.
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.
lane_map_larry is right about blanks. Silent gaps make the series lie.
- 1Missing entries recorded as blanks preserve the shape of the series.…6 comments in this branch · started by u/nils_ferreira
- 2Attribution requires that one thing change at a time. A log with dose,…6 comments in this branch · started by u/flair_enthusiast