You may or may not find it useful, but I’ve found PhysicsDiet.com to be a useful tool. Here’s a review, after a fashion. I want to give “keenlife” credit for pointing out this tool.
The Problem
In Pick Nits Only When Useful, Then Stop I described why I weight myself every morning. In short, the purpose is to ensure that I’m progressing toward my goal, and to catch budding bad habits as soon as possible.
Of course, the downside is that a human’s weight can easily swing by a pound or more a day, making it difficult to eyeball what’s going on. When you record your weight daily, there’s a lot of ups and downs. It becomes difficult to discern whether a change in weight is an ordinary fluctuation, or whether it means something.
The Strategy
In my involvement with biomedical research over the past twenty years, as with most research, distinguishing between useful information and meaningless ups and down (called “noise”) is a classic problem. A common strategy to help get around this is to smooth out the bumps. This process , not surprisingly, is called “smoothing”. One can look at the smoothed number to make decisions, not the bumpy daily weight.
The down side is that it takes a modest amount of work to correctly smooth information. The math is not difficult, but it’s tedious. Computers take the pain out of the process.
Unfortunately, spreadsheets like Excel or Calc (part of the OpenOffice suite) don’t generally include common smoothing strategies.
The Tool
PhysicsDiet.com uses a strategy to smooth out the bumpy daily changes in a person’s weight, and reports the “smoothed” weight as your “real” weight. It also shows a picture of your weight over time.
This is useful because it helps to remove some of the emotion from the process. If you’re on the track You’ll see lots of green. A single “bad” day won’t kill your progress. It will take several “bad” days to start showing an effect on your “real” weight. In other words, you’ll see the trend, not a fluke.
A downside is the annoying, large Google ads throughout the site. Also, for detail-oriented people the options may be somewhat limited. Those wanting to track many details may not be happy with the fact that it only allows weight and body fat percentage to be entered.
An Example
This chart shows the weight of a person I know well. She was struggling at first with weight loss, her weight going up and down daily. Green shows daily weight measurements that are below the “real” weight (blue line). Red shows daily weight measurements that are above the “real” weight.
It reports at the bottom that there was an average of 0.12 pounds lost every week. Not much, but it’s in the right direction. After seeing the chart, she realized that she wasn’t really getting anywhere.
This information helped her decide to reformulate her strategy. Her current chart shows good news. Notice that the one “bad” day in the last month shows up as just a blip. It doesn’t blow everything. The blue line is still going down.
The summary reports that now she’s losing about a pound per week. This has helped provide motivation for daily walking.
2008-08-03: Minor text tweaks, add pictures.
Wow, that’s really interesting! Thanks very much for putting this together.
Physics diet is a great resource, as was the original Hacker’s Diet. What a great free resource that just laid out the truth for us to read. Eating too much makes you fat. Getting your calorie intake below a certain point causes weight loss. Don’t worry about the daily number on the scale, use a weighted average to follow the trend. I am sure that is one Internet resource that has helped so many people.
I am checking out your blog as you so kindly left a comment on my new blog, (Th)inner Space! Congrats on blogging your way to a thinner life. I so agree about tracking weight, and its great to have tools and graphs that help you see the trend. You have a great blog here!
I think something like this would be really helpful, i follow a diet where there is access to a similar tool, but i much prefer the look of this one.
My friend has recently joined Gyminee and says that is also a good site.
Thanks for stopping by my page as well.
This looks interesting. I’m going to check it out although at first glance it brought back some really bad memories of a college statistics class that I flunked a couple of times.
Congratulations on your success.