[Update] week 44 — first stall in eleven months
week 44 — first stall in eleven months. Full detail below, and I have tried to keep the editorialising out of it.
Built an elaborate spreadsheet, abandoned it by week nine, restarted with four columns and have kept it ever since.
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.
If somebody has the same thing measured a different way, post it next to mine and we will see whether they agree.
best — the order this archive was captured in
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.
the column you will wish you had is sleep
Same conditions each time for the weigh-in?
retrospective logs drift, contemporaneous ones do not
Push back: a log with four variables changing at once cannot attribute anything to any of them.
Push back: a log with four variables changing at once cannot attribute anything to any of them.
Agreed — and the payoff genuinely arrives in month six, not week two.
That template is elaborate enough that you will stop using it by week ten. Mine was.
annotate the weeks where something else changed
Exported the whole thing to a plain text file after nearly losing it in an app that shut down.
Yes — log what happened rather than what you intended. My retrospective entries were quietly wrong every time.
a log is not a plan and it is not advice for anybody else
Did anything else change in the window you are asking about?
log what you did, not what you meant to do
log what you did, not what you meant to do
Adding the column everyone adds late — sleep. Start with it.
Added a sleep column late and immediately understood two of my worst weeks.
I would not draw a trend line through that. Two points and a gap is not a series.
Correction: those two entries are 8 weeks apart, not consecutive, which changes how the middle of that series reads.
record the dose, the day and one number, that is enough
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