Hey all, I have a question about my weight loss goal that kind of messed up in Beeminder. See the relevant link here: weightloss | billkaeb/weightloss goal page
I missed my weigh in goal [I weight in daily] and it only gave me 13 hours or so to make weight. I’ve gone through my settings and can’t figure out why that is the case. Ideally I’d like 24 hours in order to be able to make weight and bring it back.
Can someone take a look at my settings and see what I am missing?
Thanks!
Hi! It’s really useful to know what you expected here, and that this wasn’t clear – thank you for mentioning! It actually seems to me like everything’s working as expected: if you weigh in over the line, you have until the next time the deadline hits to weigh in under again.
On a manual entry goal, I’d suggest changing the deadline to just before you usually weigh in, so that if you’re over you do have 24 hours to weigh in under, but I’m not sure about on Withings goals and whether that works (I suspect not – it usually doesn’t work with autodata because even if you changed the deadline on Beeminder, the integration wouldn’t change the dates it reports to match, since moving deadlines on Beeminder changes the time that the date changes for that graph).
It might be that you need a bit more fluctuation buffer to help in those cases – I keep a good amount of it for the way my weight fluctuates, and it means I don’t get reminders or anything, and have to kind of watch the trend myself… but it still works for me.
(Fluctuation buffer is the answer to the question “how much can your weight change in one day?” It’s your safeguard against the random fluctuations that happen depending on how much you’ve eaten/drunk.)
Anyway, it looks like you’ve derailed now; if you feel that’s non-legit for any reason, like because you’d expected at least 24 hours to get back on track and would’ve done things differently if you’d known, then do reply to the legitimacy check email to let support know!
I’ve got a non-standard deadline on my withings goal and it seems to work.
Philip, can you share how youve set that up?
My setup is commitment deal is - 0.5 pd a week
My ratchet is 101 days. To be honest i have no idea what that means! Ive tried looking it up but its all Greek to me.
My respite is 1 day of buffer. My fluctuation buffer is 1.5 in goal units.
My issue is when i weighed in it only gave me 13 hours to make weight? But i actually wanted 24 hours abd thought i had set it up thar way. Is there a way to modify this to change it to 24 hours?
Also, after i didnt make weight it reset to a higher set point? I didnt want that. I still want to be on track to lose. 5 pds a week from the initial weigh in. Is there a way to change that as well?
The deadline time is always the deadline – so if you weigh in just after the last deadline time, then you can have almost 24 hours to catch up. If your deadline is midnight, then if you weigh in at 00:01, you have 23h 59m to get back on track. If your deadline is midnight and you weigh in at 11am, then you’ll have 13 hours to get back on track.
You change your deadline under the goal’s settings section. If you generally weigh in at 11am, then I’d make the deadline 10:59am or something like that, for instance.
Does that clear that up a bit? Basically, you can’t say “I always want 24 hours from when I entered a datapoint to get a weight that’s under the line”, but you can set up the deadline so that if you weigh in at around the same time each day, you’ll have roughly 24 hours to weigh in lighter (as long as you do it before the next deadline).
“Ratcheting” is the process of removing safety buffer so your goal is due sooner. So if it’s at 101 days now and you want to be in the red today, you’d put in 0 and press ratchet.
It’s a bit more complicated for weight goals, because the amount of leeway you have can differ dramatically from day to day (e.g. I’ve gone from having 70 days of leeway to only having 50 in the course of one day where I weighed in heavier for some random reason – and then the next day went up to having 75 days of leeway)! Usually I’d err on the conservative side when ratcheting a weight goal, as a consequence, and only ratchet away a bit, see how it goes for a few days, and then ratchet a bit more.
The fluctuation buffer is designed to prevent you derailing due to random daily fluctuations in weight, e.g. due to drinking more, and you told us that the amount your weight can randomly vary is 1.5 units, so that’s the amount we add back on top of your current weight when putting you back on track. If you don’t want to have fluctuation buffer and you don’t want any leeway after a derailment, you can change your respite settings so you have 0 days of buffer and 0 fluctuation buffer.
To put it another way, the number of days of buffer is the number of days we set the rate to 0 for after a derailment, and fluctuation buffer is the number of units extra we give you in order that you won’t derail due to a random day where you drank more water, or whatever.
Thanks so much for this. Sorry for not responding earlier. I’ve eliminated my buffer and we will see where this goes from here!
I’ve realized I also need another Beeminder that just checks to see that I have logged in 4x a week or so, give or take [although I’m not sure what I would do for holidays!].