Add a moving average weight goal
Weight goals driven by the scale can be frustrating because daily variations wildly out-weigh the actual day to day weight lost or gained. In other words, most days you're measuring water. A moving average (with, e.g. more weight on recent days but summing over the last 10 -- see The Hacker Diet) offers a much more realistic view of the weight lost.
Beeminder already has the turquoise swath etc. for this, but - as far as I can see - I can't use those data points as the actual beeminder target value so have to worry about arbitrary fluctuations messing with the graph, or try to lose lots of water weight on bad days.
Would it be possible to have beeminder take my whitings scale data and, instead of plotting the most recent point directly, plot the current moving average. Alternatively it could plot the most recent data point, but determine red/green/blue/charge based on the moving average rather than the most recent, largely random, data point?
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Admindreeves
(Cofounder, Beeminder)
commented
@Jonah, I adore The Hacker's Diet and our moving average line is exactly as the author of that book recommends. The Hacker's Diet then suggests that you ensure that when you're in intense weight loss mode that all your datapoints be below the moving average. That's not actually too different than Beeminder's insistence that all the datapoints be on the Yellow Brick Road.
PS: I hate for people's votes to be diluted so I'm thinking we should close this suggestion and move the discussion to this suggestion (where most of the votes are): http://beeminder.uservoice.com/forums/3011-general/suggestions/3097030-use-the-purple-line-weighted-moving-average-to-d
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Anonymous
commented
Daniel,
You may want to reconsider your position. I'd suggest looking over this book: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
It is very well established that the majority of daily fluctuations are due to water weight changes, mostly driven by your carbohydrate and salt intake -- calories are only a small factor.
I personally have well over 5 years of daily weigh in data from the last 10-15 years or so, and daily fluctuations of 2-3 lbs in either direction are the norm even on a strictly monitored diet with a substantial calorie deficit. I will occasionally see fluctuations of 5 lbs or more, especially after reintroducing carbs after a low-carb period.
What you want to use is 7 or 10 day, exponentially-smoothed rolling average, per the book linked to. Then your goal becomes to keep THAT number on a downward trend. This means that your "success" is not linked to random noise, but to what are you actually accomplishing.
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Admindreeves
(Cofounder, Beeminder)
commented
Really astute suggestion, and one we've actually debated extensively on the Akratics Anonymous google group (recommended!). Let me quote myself arguing against your suggestion:
The moving average is the right thing to look at to see the trend but I don't think it will help to beemind it. Here's my concen...
Imagine your road is sloping down and you're below it at first but you weigh in every day at the same weight, 100kg. You're on a collision course with the road. After 9 days of 100kg each day, you find yourself on the wrong side of the road. It's an emergency day and you need to lose .5kg to get back on. Except you're beeminding the moving average so now you need to lose 10 times that (or whatever) to actually bring the average down enough. You're actually requiring a bunch more foresight to keep from derailing, which I think is a nonstarter. In general, being akratic and beeminding the moving average still means that you're skating the edge and every day there's some magic weight that you must weigh in at to keep from derailing. That's fundamental to beeminding weight. No matter how you try to smooth the data or widen the road, if you eked by yesterday then there will necessarily be a magic weight that you absolutely must hit today to stay on track. It's like a no-free-lunch theorem. Whatever we do ends up equivalent to having a single bright line that your (actual) weight is not allowed to cross every day.