small win: dose history stopped being a problem at week 6
Here it is: small win: dose history stopped being a problem at week 6. One person, one log, no control group, so read it accordingly.
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.
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.
Not medical advice, obviously, and nothing here is approved for human use. One person with a spreadsheet.
best — the order this archive was captured in
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.
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Agreed that consistent conditions matter more than frequency. Daily weights under varying conditions are noise.
What are you actually recording each week?
retrospective logs drift, contemporaneous ones do not
export it somewhere you will still be able to read in two years
Reminder: no dose recommendations for other members, however the post is framed.
Correction: those two entries are 24 weeks apart, not consecutive, which changes how the middle of that series reads.
Missing entries recorded as blanks preserve the shape of the series. Dropping them silently makes the remaining points look more regular than they were.
This. Annotating the weeks where something else changed is what makes the log interpretable later.
one line a week beats a spreadsheet you abandon
Choose a format you will still be able to open in two years. Plain text or a spreadsheet you export beats an application that may not exist.
Did anything else change in the window you are asking about?
Did anything else change in the window you are asking about?
This is the whole discipline in one line. Contemporaneous, consistent, minimal.
Agreed. One line a week that actually gets written beats an elaborate template abandoned in month two.
log what you did, not what you meant to do
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
I would not draw a trend line through that. Two points and a gap is not a series.
Disagree with daily weighing. You are logging fluid, and the emotional cost is real for very little information.
A log is a record of what you did. It is not a protocol, and posting one as a schedule for other members is a different thing that this board does not do.
annotate the weeks where something else changed
What is the one column you added late and wish you had from the start?
Same conditions each time for the weigh-in?
write the concentration in the log too
Attribution requires that one thing change at a time. A log with dose, training and intake all moving in the same fortnight cannot assign anything to any of them.
That is a waist figure in the weight column. Easy mistake and it makes the chart look dramatic.
Cosigning on missed weeks. Leaving them blank makes the whole series misleading.
That template is elaborate enough that you will stop using it by week ten. Mine was.
record the dose, the day and one number, that is enough
- 1Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift…7 comments in this branch · started by u/amara_dziedzic
- 2The attribution problem, which is the reason most logs on this board cannot…6 comments in this branch · started by u/formulary_fighter