I have a big pile of Christmas candy.
How do I make sure it lasts until Christmas?
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More info: (which may or may not be relevant.)
I also have a kitchen scale.
I also have small plastic bags I could use to divide it up, but this seems like a lot of work upfront.
I also have a bowl I could put a day’s ration into.
Should my consumption be linear?
What if I’m also sharing the candy with other people?
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Depends on what, exactly your goal is. I’d personally just use a do-less weight goal to make sure it lasts until Christmas. I’d also count sharing with others, but that appeals to my sense of virtue ethics 
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Put all the candy on the weight. Your total amount of candy from now and until christmas is that, you deadline is christmas and your goal type is do less.
Each time you want some candy you weight it out - either for an entire day or multiple times and update beeminder with the result, beeminder will charge you eat more than your allotted amount.
And don’t worry about the weighting - I used calorie counting to lose a lot of weight and it really doesn’t take very long to weight things out. Just check that you have decent scale first.
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I’ve done this in the past with a do-less goal: blog.beeminder.com/lildeb. That’s the most straightforward thing to do and what we’d recommend for newbees.
If you have a good way to get the current total weight of the candy then you could set up a custom goal [1] where the road slopes down but you have to stay above it. I’ve done this before to make my supply of “daily” contact lenses last till a certain date: beeminder.com/d/contacts – Every once in a while I’d tell Beeminder the total amount remaining.
[1] That requires a [premium](http://blog.beeminder.com/premium "Any premium subscription will do") subscription but we're interested in this use case so we can do an admin override and set your goal to custom for you so you can go nuts with the settings to make this work. Oh, and I guess we'll let you do this with the API even without a premium account (not sure whether that's a loophole we should close or not). Grep "rationing" at [beeminder.com/api](http://beeminder.com/api "There are 4 platonic goal types corresponding to every combination of road direction and which is the good side of the road: MOAR (stay above an upsloping road), PHAT (stay below a downsloping road), WEEN (stay below an upsloping road, aka do-less), and RASH (stay above a downsloping road) -- the last one is exceedingly rare in practice but its existence is theoretically implied") for discussion. (Or hover over that link.)
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