three years of weekly update threads, summarised so you do not have to read them
Something I keep coming back to: three years of weekly update threads, summarised so you do not have to read them.
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.
Would rather be corrected in public than confident in private.
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.
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.
Did anything else change in the window you are asking about?
That is a waist figure in the weight column. Easy mistake and it makes the chart look dramatic.
retrospective logs drift, contemporaneous ones do not
Cosigning on missed weeks. Leaving them blank makes the whole series misleading.