I’m underweight and don’t want to be. My goal is to gain 0.75 lbs a week, and I have a withings scale to record it.
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We definitely do this. Under the hood, there’s a goal type known as gainer.
Easiest thing to do is probably to set up a withings goal, and then email support@Beeminder.com with the details so that we can change the goal type and set you up with an achievable slope.
(My own history with weight suggests setting a conservative slope on the weight goal and creating complementary goals to help me eat appropriately, etc.)
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I’ll pop in here uninvited, in the hope that my experience be useful or at least
interesting.
I have no experience beeminding weight, but having gone from 140 to 94Kg, I have
some experience where weight modulation is concerned. I always had more success
when focusing on the diet than the scale numbers. For me, this meant focusing on
my hunger and sticking to my ketogenic diet.
I would try beeminding daily calories. With such a specific goal as 0.75lb/week,
I would say that calorie counting will be necessary. And as much as everyone
loves avoiding it, I’ve always found peace of mind when measuring everything. I
guess I’m a QS nerd at heart.
The problem with beeminding weight, and especially weight gain, is inconsistency
and unpredictability. Calories are predictable, and if the slope is set properly
(and adjusted every other week, more or less), should lead to predictable weight
modulation.
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It must be personality; I also think of myself as a nerd, but a previous effort at weight loss by counting calories (before I discovered Beeminder) put me off counting calories for life. What eventually took me off that diet was the drudgery of looking up and recording everything that I ate.
I’m now using a Beeminder and a rule based system, I determine what I’m allowed to eat (& drink) depending on where I am relative to the yellow brick road, and to the weighted moving average. As long as I’m below both, no rules apply (although common sense and the awareness of consequences keep me reasonable). The fact that I often am below both means there are days where I can enjoy myself, and not worry about dieting. Before, when I was calorie counting, it applied every day, without any breaks, and after a while, I couldn’t stand it any more. Using this new approach, I’ve been successful at losing 1.07 lb/week for several months now, and see no problem with carrying on with it till I reach my target near year-end.
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I’m not trying to convince you to count calories. Just sharing my experience, again. Being pragmatic and doing what works takes precedence over whatever abstract benefits one method or another may or may not bring to your life.
I found every last god damn app and website for it to be a pain in the arse, pardon my French.
I use a spreadsheet now. I spent about an hour setting it up and entering all the nutrition data for the things I usually eat, and now it’s much easier to use than any of the apps I’ve tried. The benefits, as far as I’m concerned:
- The database contains only things I actually eat.
- The database entries don’t need to agree with anyone else.
- I can call food whatever I want. Most of my entries are simple ‘eggs’ or ‘milk’, rather than ‘super duper organic eggs Mk2 from Trader Tom’. Who’d want to type that out?
- I can track what I choose to track, no pay walls, no dependency on what an abstract commercial entity might think is valuable for their brand in terms of development time. If I want to track something new, all it takes is another column in my database and 15 minutes looking up values for my usual foods.
- I can track what I want, again. On keto, I want to track carbs and sodium most of all. Yet most apps consider tracking Vitamin C more important than Sodium. And when they don’t, they keep bugging me about eating too much of it.
- It works online, or offline. I work with LibreOffice, but there’s nothing that would prevent the sheet from working in Google Sheets, if I wanted it to be available on the phone or whatever.
- It’s free. No monthly sub for a SaaS, no product to buy.
- It doesn’t tell me every day that my heart will explode if I continue with my ketogenic diet. For some reason, some of the apps out there think themselves registered dieticians.
- I can make graphs for anything I want. Weight fluctuations vs carbs eaten, protein vs weight lifted, or caloric trend vs carb trend. Whatever I want to think up, I can just toss it in a new page in the sheet.
Maybe I’m just weird and track things so very differently from everyone else. Or maybe the apps out there are just plain bad. Who knows. Using a good old spreadsheet is what made calorie counting possible in my life, and despite trying other things now and then, I keep going back to my spreadsheet.
Of course, it’s not perfect:
- Even if I use Google Sheets, the mobile experience is less than enjoyable.
- If I want a feature, I have to do it myself, and hope it can be done with a spreadsheet at all.
- Nobody has conveniently filled the database for me, ready to just pick the foods I eat from a list.
- The interface is less than pretty, sometimes even convoluted.
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