5 months in and weight is still the thing I get wrong
5 months in and weight is still the thing I get wrong. Posting the boring middle of the process, because the internet is full of the start and the end and nothing else.
Figures up front so nobody has to dig: 5 months.
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.
Contemporaneous or reconstructed?
annotate the weeks where something else changed
Reconstructed six weeks from memory once and later found receipts that contradicted my own log. Never again.
Is the concentration recorded anywhere in the log?
Did anything else change in the window you are asking about?
Reconstructed six weeks from memory once and later found receipts that contradicted my own log.
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.
I would not draw a trend line through that. Two points and a gap is not a series.
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
one line a week beats a spreadsheet you abandon
Correction: those two entries are 10 weeks apart, not consecutive, which changes how the middle of that series reads.
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