is it normal to get nausea at week 48
is it normal to get nausea at week 48. 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.
That is everything I have. The rest is opinion and I have tried to keep it out.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Left up. Dates, consistent conditions and annotations, which is the standard here.
Logged the missed weeks as blanks rather than skipping them. The gaps turned out to be the informative part.
Logged the missed weeks as blanks rather than skipping them.
Disagreeing with this bit: daily weighing gives you noise and costs you something.
consistent conditions or you are logging noise
Yes — log what happened rather than what you intended. My retrospective entries were quietly wrong every time.
Left up.
dose_diary_dana is right about blanks. Silent gaps make the series lie.
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
This is the whole discipline in one line. Contemporaneous, consistent, minimal.
a log with no dates is a story
How long have you been logging?
retrospective logs drift, contemporaneous ones do not
annotate the weeks where something else changed
Cosigning on missed weeks. Leaving them blank makes the whole series misleading.
Added a sleep column late and immediately understood two of my worst weeks.
That is a waist figure in the weight column. Easy mistake and it makes the chart look dramatic.
Small fix — that is a reconstructed entry rather than a contemporaneous one, and the post presents it as the latter.
waist monthly, weight weekly, notes whenever
Yes — write the concentration in the log as well as on the vial. Belt and braces and it costs nothing.
Kept one line a week for 21 months. It was pointless for the first eight weeks and then it was the most useful document I owned.
Added a sleep column late and immediately understood two of my worst weeks.
Adding the column everyone adds late — sleep. Start with it.
the value of a log is in month six, not week one
- 1Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift…8 comments in this branch · started by u/mariam_mensa
- 2Added a sleep column late and immediately understood two of my worst weeks.8 comments in this branch · started by u/ms_fragmenter