[Meta] the goal rule is doing its job and people should stop complaining
the goal rule is doing its job and people should stop complaining — with the counter-argument included, because I find it fairly persuasive.
The first thing I noticed was a jacket doing up. The scale had been flat for three weeks at that point.
9kg over 15 months and honestly the most useful marker was that stairs stopped being a decision.
Nothing on this board is medical advice, and rate, target and method are questions for somebody who knows your history.
That is everything I have. The rest is opinion and I have tried to keep it out.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Nobody has to post a starting weight, and comments demanding one get removed.
What to measure if you want to stay sane through the flat parts.
Weight, under consistent conditions, no more than weekly. Waist, monthly — it frequently keeps moving when the scale does not. And one non-scale thing a week written down: a garment, a staircase, a distance, an ordinary task that got easier.
A year of those three is a far better record than a year of daily weights, and reading the third column back is the part that actually means something. The daily number is noise dressed up as information, and it has ruined more months on this board than any plateau.
Wrote down one non-scale thing every week. Reading a year of those back was more affecting than any number.
Did the clothes change before the number did for you too?
Right — the non-scale victories are the ones I remember. The numbers all blur together after a while.
Circumference measurements often continue changing during a scale plateau because composition changes are not visible on a bathroom scale.
Is the goal you set at the start still the goal?
Yes. The middle is where everybody actually lives and almost nobody posts from it.
say what changed for you, not what should change for others
Agreed that goal weights picked at the start are guesses. Mine was, and I revised it twice.
the first person to notice was me, months after it started
The boring middle lasted the longest and it is the part I am most proud of.
This. Waist measurement kept moving through my longest stall and it was the only thing that kept me sane.
My goal weight at week one was a number I made up. I have revised it twice since and I am happier for it.
Gently disagree with the framing — that is not a plateau, that is a month. They are different things.
Why this board is text only, since new members ask every week.
A photograph invites comparison on things nobody can control — lighting, posture, where you carry weight, what you looked like before any of this. Text invites description of what changed for you: the jacket, the stairs, the measurement, the month it took.
The result is a board where the posts are about people’s actual experience rather than about images, and where nobody is competing on the wrong axis. It was a deliberate choice, it has been challenged periodically, and every time it has been kept.
Rate of change is not a virtue. Slower trajectories are as durable as fast ones and are considerably better represented on this board than the front page suggests.
I would not treat a two-kilo range as a regain. Weight varies day to day in everybody.
Text-only posting removes the comparison mechanism that makes image boards difficult, which is why this community adopted the rule and has kept it.
- 1Circumference measurements often continue changing during a scale plateau…8 comments in this branch · started by u/yara_antonsen