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It's cool seeing the numbers but on a practical level I think they're a distraction. To track weight loss, you only need to measure your weight at the same time

It's cool seeing the numbers but on a practical level I think they're a distraction. To track weight loss, you only need to measure your weight at the same time every day (e.g morning before breakfast) and use a rolling 7-day average for good measure. The number on the scale is less real than the rolling average.

ajuc 3y ago
Yup, there's like 10 different factors that change on daily basis.
iopq 3y ago
You will have a lower 7 day rolling average on a low carb diet than on a high carb diet because of glycogen. A low carb diet will deplete it faster, so you will think it's working better, but in actuality the effect is temporary. You need to be cognizant of glycogen while dieting so you don't get fooled. Otherwise you will think your diet stopped working after a while
- somenameforme 3y ago
  "Diets" don't really make any logical sense from a weight management perspective as a liminal thing. Your body will always trend towards a given weight for a given caloric input, because one of the biggest factors in your daily caloric burn is how much you already weigh. And as you lose weight, it goes down. In other words, your equilibrium caloric intake will decrease as you lose weight. So if you go on a diet, drop 30 lbs, and then go back to eating the same amount you were before, then you're going to regain those 30lbs right on back. The reason checking the scale is useful is because they can clue you in on where a given caloric input is taking you, up or down. The details and timeline aren't really relevant, because if you want the gains to stay then that "diet" is your new, permanent, lifestyle.
  - MattJ100 3y ago
    Your logic seems to imply that any given "diet" leads to either increasing or decreasing weight. If you were overweight but stable, a temporary restriction followed by a return to the original diet would suffice, right? That's where this article is helpful, as it explains how (and how much) weight gain can be expected when you end the temporary restrictions.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      In general, no. People's bodies vary dramatically, but in the end after everything (metabolism, lifestyle, and numerous other factors) is accounted for you're basically going to end up with a table at any given snapshot in time. And that table will give you a weight you'll end up at if consume 'x' calories per day. The reason going on a fixed deficit (or bulk) will not just endlessly let you lose or gain weight is because when you lose weight, your body starts being able to operate on fewer and fewer calories. Your metabolism might improve, but nowhere near enough to counter this effect. And vice versa when for bulking. If you have a high tolerance for food repetition, you can even experimentally see this really easily. Lay out a diet for cutting and you can see the scale will gradually trend towards some specific weight with the decreases getting smaller and smaller. And vice versa when bulking, where you'll see initial big gains followed by a leveling out as your body approaches its new equilibrium caloric intake. This is something anybody who's done any e.g. body building can attest to. So going on a deficit and then going back to eating what you were just means that you're just going to head back to your old weight. So diets really need to be a permanent lifestyle thing, which is why finding one you can be comfortable with is so critical.
  - iopq 3y ago
    Then just don't go back to eating as much > The reason checking the scale is useful is because they can clue you in on where a given caloric input is taking you, up or down. you could just grab your stomach fat to get a more accurate progress measurement
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
lloeki 3y ago
Once upon a time I gained a lot of weight (20+kg, crossing the "obese" BMI bar) over a dozen or so years, and started to physically feel really bad. I realised that if I want to save my life (as in not dying from a heart attack or something but also being a living entity while not feeling absolute garbage every day, which would be wasting my life) I had to do something. Since it took me that much time to gain that weight and wanted to go back to feeling my best in a way that sticks I set up a weight loss plan that would unfold over the same amount of time than it took, because there's just no shortcuts to it. So I did a big ass spreadsheet, plotting rolling 7 day + rolling 24 days and their derivatives. Key insights of my strategy: - instant measurement does not matter, as in it's actually not worth looking at every day, only retrospectively when observed as a collection upon looking for root causes of deviations of the averages. most advices about weighting in at a certain time or a certain day of the week is about faking an average with discrete measurements (which kinda works but requires extremely effortful consistency to make sense, and any error throws the fake average off big time) - 24 day average is really nice and meaningful: missing or mismeasuring (not weighting early morning+ after poop, scale glitch...) a few measurements would be inconsequential, a couple stray events would not affect it, a positive derivative would mean I must take immediate action (as in, get back on track with being consistent) to correct course and reverse the trend. when in the losing weight phase, a negative derivative closing in towards zero would mean I should pay a bit more attention to being consistent. as target weight† nears or is attained the meaning of that derivative shifts a bit (obviously one does not want to perpetually lose weight, so things offset and taper off) - if weighting multiple times a day for averages it would consider only the minimum for that day, but it would also give me a spread for a given day, allowing me to understand fine grained details of my body behaviour in face of specific events (overeating, undereating, doing sports, drinking water, drinking alcohol when partying) and compare that to the next day(s). such events preceding each measurement were annotated on the corresponding row. - from an initial data gathering and retrospective, 24 day appeared to be my body latency: when I did something effective or veered off course the effect would visibly settle in as long term weight loss or gain after that amount of time (this would be visible in raw data, not artificially come from the average construction, so I tuned that average to 24 days to produce the corresponding synthetic, immediately meaningful derivative value) - 7 day allows for shorter term observation and reactions, but is more susceptible to noise. It appeared from observational data that it was the rough scale at which things would start to have long term effects happening at t+latency. e.g not doing sports, or overeating, or bad sleep from t to t+5~7 would produce a long term, lasting effet at t+20~25 days; lower than that and it would just evaporate. overall it removed a whole lot of complexity, guesswork, and guilt, which translated in not skipping measurements, which produced more and better data, making the whole process a non-event, progressively building healthy habits, making it easier to course correct, and so on and so forth. the end: I shed all the excess weight two years before the "deadline" without feeling that I put much effort into it (there was effort, especially when I needed to kick my ass a couple times, but it did not feel like I was constantly abusing my body; the "consistency" effort was spread out and thus much more manageable). concretely I ended up both feeling (internal assessment) and looking (external feedback) younger in my late 30s than in my late 20s. I've since replaced that with a Garmin watch + scale and the Garmin app does pretty much what my spreadsheet did, minus the derivative bits, which I really miss. † I never aimed for an actual weight value, but for an intrinsic feeling of healthiness, which for me happens to correspond to a specific weight range.
sn9 3y ago
Apps like Macrofactor do this for you. You just track your weight and your caloric intake and it tells you how much you're burning and how much more or less you need to hit a particular rate of weight change.

ajuc 3y ago

Yup, there's like 10 different factors that change on daily basis.

iopq 3y ago

You will have a lower 7 day rolling average on a low carb diet than on a high carb diet because of glycogen. A low carb diet will deplete it faster, so you will think it's working better, but in actuality the effect is temporary. You need to be cognizant of glycogen while dieting so you don't get fooled. Otherwise you will think your diet stopped working after a while

somenameforme 3y ago
"Diets" don't really make any logical sense from a weight management perspective as a liminal thing. Your body will always trend towards a given weight for a given caloric input, because one of the biggest factors in your daily caloric burn is how much you already weigh. And as you lose weight, it goes down. In other words, your equilibrium caloric intake will decrease as you lose weight. So if you go on a diet, drop 30 lbs, and then go back to eating the same amount you were before, then you're going to regain those 30lbs right on back. The reason checking the scale is useful is because they can clue you in on where a given caloric input is taking you, up or down. The details and timeline aren't really relevant, because if you want the gains to stay then that "diet" is your new, permanent, lifestyle.
- MattJ100 3y ago
  Your logic seems to imply that any given "diet" leads to either increasing or decreasing weight. If you were overweight but stable, a temporary restriction followed by a return to the original diet would suffice, right? That's where this article is helpful, as it explains how (and how much) weight gain can be expected when you end the temporary restrictions.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    In general, no. People's bodies vary dramatically, but in the end after everything (metabolism, lifestyle, and numerous other factors) is accounted for you're basically going to end up with a table at any given snapshot in time. And that table will give you a weight you'll end up at if consume 'x' calories per day. The reason going on a fixed deficit (or bulk) will not just endlessly let you lose or gain weight is because when you lose weight, your body starts being able to operate on fewer and fewer calories. Your metabolism might improve, but nowhere near enough to counter this effect. And vice versa when for bulking. If you have a high tolerance for food repetition, you can even experimentally see this really easily. Lay out a diet for cutting and you can see the scale will gradually trend towards some specific weight with the decreases getting smaller and smaller. And vice versa when bulking, where you'll see initial big gains followed by a leveling out as your body approaches its new equilibrium caloric intake. This is something anybody who's done any e.g. body building can attest to. So going on a deficit and then going back to eating what you were just means that you're just going to head back to your old weight. So diets really need to be a permanent lifestyle thing, which is why finding one you can be comfortable with is so critical.
- iopq 3y ago
  Then just don't go back to eating as much > The reason checking the scale is useful is because they can clue you in on where a given caloric input is taking you, up or down. you could just grab your stomach fat to get a more accurate progress measurement
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

lloeki 3y ago

Once upon a time I gained a lot of weight (20+kg, crossing the "obese" BMI bar) over a dozen or so years, and started to physically feel really bad. I realised that if I want to save my life (as in not dying from a heart attack or something but also being a living entity while not feeling absolute garbage every day, which would be wasting my life) I had to do something. Since it took me that much time to gain that weight and wanted to go back to feeling my best in a way that sticks I set up a weight loss plan that would unfold over the same amount of time than it took, because there's just no shortcuts to it. So I did a big ass spreadsheet, plotting rolling 7 day + rolling 24 days and their derivatives. Key insights of my strategy: - instant measurement does not matter, as in it's actually not worth looking at every day, only retrospectively when observed as a collection upon looking for root causes of deviations of the averages. most advices about weighting in at a certain time or a certain day of the week is about faking an average with discrete measurements (which kinda works but requires extremely effortful consistency to make sense, and any error throws the fake average off big time) - 24 day average is really nice and meaningful: missing or mismeasuring (not weighting early morning+ after poop, scale glitch...) a few measurements would be inconsequential, a couple stray events would not affect it, a positive derivative would mean I must take immediate action (as in, get back on track with being consistent) to correct course and reverse the trend. when in the losing weight phase, a negative derivative closing in towards zero would mean I should pay a bit more attention to being consistent. as target weight† nears or is attained the meaning of that derivative shifts a bit (obviously one does not want to perpetually lose weight, so things offset and taper off) - if weighting multiple times a day for averages it would consider only the minimum for that day, but it would also give me a spread for a given day, allowing me to understand fine grained details of my body behaviour in face of specific events (overeating, undereating, doing sports, drinking water, drinking alcohol when partying) and compare that to the next day(s). such events preceding each measurement were annotated on the corresponding row. - from an initial data gathering and retrospective, 24 day appeared to be my body latency: when I did something effective or veered off course the effect would visibly settle in as long term weight loss or gain after that amount of time (this would be visible in raw data, not artificially come from the average construction, so I tuned that average to 24 days to produce the corresponding synthetic, immediately meaningful derivative value) - 7 day allows for shorter term observation and reactions, but is more susceptible to noise. It appeared from observational data that it was the rough scale at which things would start to have long term effects happening at t+latency. e.g not doing sports, or overeating, or bad sleep from t to t+5~7 would produce a long term, lasting effet at t+20~25 days; lower than that and it would just evaporate. overall it removed a whole lot of complexity, guesswork, and guilt, which translated in not skipping measurements, which produced more and better data, making the whole process a non-event, progressively building healthy habits, making it easier to course correct, and so on and so forth. the end: I shed all the excess weight two years before the "deadline" without feeling that I put much effort into it (there was effort, especially when I needed to kick my ass a couple times, but it did not feel like I was constantly abusing my body; the "consistency" effort was spread out and thus much more manageable). concretely I ended up both feeling (internal assessment) and looking (external feedback) younger in my late 30s than in my late 20s. I've since replaced that with a Garmin watch + scale and the Garmin app does pretty much what my spreadsheet did, minus the derivative bits, which I really miss. † I never aimed for an actual weight value, but for an intrinsic feeling of healthiness, which for me happens to correspond to a specific weight range.

sn9 3y ago

Apps like Macrofactor do this for you. You just track your weight and your caloric intake and it tells you how much you're burning and how much more or less you need to hit a particular rate of weight change.