Beeminding my Moving Average

Akrasia
1

aka sidestepping a dead horse…

I hacked together a workaround to beemind the moving average of my daily weight values instead of the daily values themselves. You can take a look here: https://www.beeminder.com/mwalla/lessfat_esma

I do the input and math in a Tasker “app”, which gives me a quick report and logs my moving average to my beeminder goal via an email trigger to IFTTT (which also logs a datapoint to my daily weigh-in goal and my actual weight measurement to a google sheet).

The email especially feels a little kludgy, but it ended up being the simplest/easiest way for me.

I think this will overcome a lot of the limitations of weight loss goals as currently implemented (e.g. surprise derailments) and make meaningful things like the lanes and safety buffer.

And even though this means beeminding an outcome, it’s the outcome I care about, and approaching the edge will (I hope) prompt me to take short-term actions that I may not be beeminding explicitly–like track and restrict calories for a few days.

And as for inputs, right now I’m only beeminding two: daily fruits and veggies (partially as a proxy for junk food replacement), and a new meta-goal for weighing daily (this one will get almost no buffer, and I’ll probably up the pledge too).

Now let’s see if I can keep this up for 2-3 years! :slight_smile:

4 Likes
2

I posted to your other thread here.

I think there should be a movingaverage added to the custom aggregation methods we already have such as truemean.

2 Likes
3

Thanks so much for these posts and helping us think this stuff through more carefully. Couple quick things to point out for now: our elaborate argument against beeminding the moving average, and the fact that we can’t easily add a moving average as an aggday function because those currently only aggregate datapoints for a single day. Not to say we’ll never do that; just that for many aggday functions, if you describe a use case for some crazy aggregation scheme, we’ll gladly throw it into the mix. But not for aggregating across multiple days, unless we rearchitect things a bit.

2 Likes