It’s been my observation that when I fail a weight loss goal and pay the piper (or the bees), that the next morning my weight is often low enough to have not derailed.
This is an artifact of how different body systems work - and how they interact with sleep. I almost always weigh at about the same time in the morning (about 0500) wearing only my wedding ring.
Inevitably, if I weigh at some other time of day (even with the same circumstances), I weigh more.
So, the suggestion is that at least for some goals (like those tied to auto-measuring scales) that one be allowed the option of having the derail timeout be as late as 0900 (or 1000) the next morning.
The only ways to lose weight in a matter of a few hours during the day are extremely unhealthy. However, if I wait until morning, things often resolve themselves with no effort on my part.
Apparently that’s only available if you pay more to use Beeminder. I have the first level paid subscription, and that option is greyed-out and has a red circle-slash icon when I mouse over it.
For weight-loss goals, the model of giving you faster and faster reminders until midnight encourages unhealthy behavior – or is just incredibly annoying. You simply aren’t going to lose weight until you sleep a bit - giving your body a chance to digest, recharge and process some body fat into CO2 and water.
I just realized I can turn off Zeno polling - so I did that. But for weight loss, the defaults encourage unhealthy behavior. The combination of a midnight goal date and Zeno polling (both are default, and one you have to pay a good bit to override) is unhealthy.
I doubt anyone thinks that having an unhealthy default is a good thing.
It also appears that you can’t have any goal time out set to be before noon - which is exactly what’s needed here. At least, that’s how I understand the article @adamwolf kindly pointed me at.
The article is outdated and should be amended. There’s still a limit, because of trying to distinguish between early-birds and night-owls, but you can definitely set a deadline in what is (to most of us) firmly in the morning.
But I fear that simply changing the deadline isn’t going to do what you want.
I too have the same experience, where the weigh-in that derails me is a one-off anomaly, and that the following day’s weigh in would be back on the road.
For moving the deadline to accommodate this, it would have to be that both weigh-ins were on the same Beeminder day, i.e. within the same 24 hour period.
For the deadline to assist in this miracle, you’d have to set it to be shortly before you usually weigh in, so that the following day you can get up a bit earlier than normal and weigh in before the deadline.
If you figure out a deadline time that makes sense, email us on support@beeminder.com and we can set it up for you. But do be prepared for weirdness.
In an earlier world, we had magical auto-widenening roads, so that if you were weighing in regularly and staying in the ‘good’ lane, no amount of one-day weight gain would be enough to derail you.
But even that didn’t protect you if you happened not to have weighed in every day, or had drifted above the road’s centre-line. Or, as has happened to me, you have two up-days in a row, rather than just the one.