Beeminding weightloss without relying on self-reporting?

Lessons learned from losing 20kg of weight and retaining the loss, plus Beeminding weight/body fat for 5+ years:

  • I use automated data entry as much as possible (you figured that already): there are plenty of relatively cheap bluetooth-enabled scales that will sync to Fitbit (and Beeminder can sync from Fitbit)
  • Goals are at $1/max $5 with plenty of buffer. Weight/fat have fluctuations on a dialy basis which is normal
  • For a more accurate look and where I’m heading, I also beemind trends (https://trendweight.com/ calculates these using the Hacker’s Diet formula and syncs with Fitbit) - (at some point someone will ask me about it here :smiley: Automated: Weight/Fat trends)
  • Fasting works (also beeminded at a 16h/day rate) - manual entry but Zero app (https://www.zerofasting.com/ iOS/Android) makes tracking very easy
  • Calories tracking is also essential for me - I use MyFitnessPal and beemind manually “net calories” (e.g. surplus or deficit from the daily goal
  • Last two years I have reduced carbs - they are autobeeminded via Apple Health although that’s not working very well and therefore have a lot of buffer on that goal
  • I also beemind exercise-related goals but I wont go into that to avoid scaring you :smiley:

Is that a lot? Probably. Is it working? Yes. Are there multiple health/psychological/productivity benefits? You bet :slight_smile:

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Self-reporting is pretty central to using Beeminder but I think you hit on something important when you realized that maybe you had the pledges too high which caused you to not be willing to refrain from… um… doctoring the data. I love Adam’s idea of starting to track while giving yourself a LOT of space so that you get into the habit without feeling the pressure yet. It’s probably enough, at first, to just be paying attention to what your baseline is. If you did that and then just made the goal just a little harder, bit by bit, that might be a really nice way to ease into it. Very slowly. It might also keep you from being sort of unproductively mean to yourself about it. Just starting tracking is already a huge step in the right direction and it should leave you feeling like you’re already doing a lot since you in fact are.

If you find that you end up in a “Screw it; this is too much work” mood late at night when you’re tired, you might also want to have a do-more goal for entering what you’ve eaten into your food journal. Set yourself a reminder to add the +1 before bed, so that you’re sure you’re not entering the +1 at a time when you might eat again and then forget to log the food. I’d start slow on that one, too. If you’re not already logging every day, start making sure you’re logging 2 or 3 days a week, then 4 or 5, and maybe finally 6 or 7, so you’re working up to it. After all, limiting calories is more than one task since it requires first logging your calories, so ramping that up separately might take some getting used to.

Anyway, YMMV! It’s going to come down to figuring out what the linchpins are for you and tracking those. You might find that there are entirely separate things that predict how well you’re eating and that have nothing to do with calorie counting.

Personally, I need to track my food intake cause I’m a little blind as to whether I’m eating enough, too little, in a balanced way, getting enough sodium, and so on. I can end up at the end of one day and have a headache and not know why and realize it’s cause I’ve eaten 1/3 of what I’m supposed to and haven’t drank all day, and then the next day have not noticed that I had all I should probably have all day by lunch. I’m kind of unaware that way, but the things that work best for me for trying to actually change body composition have usually broken apart from that tracking. Beeminding not eating after a certain time of day (and sometimes also not eating before a certain time in the morning—a kind of intermittent fasting) has worked for me, especially in combination with not allowing myself to buy more than one food with sugar added per week or two (with some exceptions for reasons too boring to get into). I have reactive hypoglycaemia, though, so these things have helped me keep myself from riding the blood sugar roller coaster and, for me, that was enough (well… that and walking 40-60 minutes on weekdays since I walked to/from work). But the intake tracking, while useful to keep me aware of what I was eating, played little role in actually helping me with changes to body composition.

Anyway, good luck and I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts as you keep brainstorming in here as you go!

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Unless you get a Withings or Fitbit Aria scale, both of which Beeminder integrates with!

One trick for making self-reporting harder to circumvent is to have a setup where the self-reported data serves multiple purposes and keeping your data clean is important to you.

Lots of caveats about calorie restriction before this example that may or may not be helpful to you:

  • My understanding of the science is that in the short term it works for anyone who sticks to it but in the long run it does not work for everyone because it can cause peoples’ metabolisms to adjust.
  • It did not work as a weight loss strategy for me. I did not stick to it for multiple reasons that beeminder would not have fixed. What is working for me is not particularly conducive to beeminding.
  • Even though I had the data and could have easily, I did not beemind it because my personal experience is that regularity of eating is important to my wellbeing and beeminder encourages building up buffer that you can spend. Though an autotrimming buffer of 0 days (something like 0.1 days might be good, but beeminder doesn’t support that) could work.

But I could have beeminded my calories because the app I used (Cronometer) gave me really good data about all the nutrients in my diet and I wouldn’t want to mess up that data. And it syncs to beeminder through apple health. I can’t speak to how well that’s working, but the apple health distance is working well for me now and it didn’t in the past.

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Nothing majorly helpful to add here; just wanted to say that I use Cronometer too now and I love it.

Hi, thank you everyone for your input and ideas! I’ve mulled over a lot of things and I think the best thing to do as suggested by @zedmango and others in the thread. I think personally I’ve had a lot of bad history with cal counting and it feels very easy to weasel about the data since calorie trackers can be somewhat vague.
It also feels like it’s hard to ever make calorie tracking a natural, life-long habit vs something like cooking a meal a day.
Auto-input scales and having a weight goal might be something to do in future but I think yeah, weight being a product of many things means it’s probably if nothing else can stick
I have worked on my weaseling, adjusting the cost has helped a lot as well as the understanding that if I don’t stop weaseling, I basically lose functionality and trying out other goals has shown me how useful beeminder has been for me! It’s really changed a lot of things and it’s stuck more than anything else has for me.
One other thing that has helped with weaseling is to try and strictly define what counts as meet the goals or not. I hate failing on goals but admitting every failure strengthens this system that I have going.
Another major relization from my failed calorie counting is that beeminder can influence me but I can’t make myself do acts of hercules proportions consistently so thank you to those who suggested building up to larger goals.
So far I have taken up doing IF, I have derailed a few times but still more success than failures and it has resulted in me actually refusing food I was previously set on and stopping me from rummeraging around for food when I was bored.
I think other adjacent goals to pursue are
*Stocking my personal fridge with easy to acess good foods (I live with 4 other people with bad eating habits that I cannot convince to not leave food around hence why it’s not as simple as not buying it in the first place) and thus ensuring I fill up on those.
*Cooking a meal once a day and eating it
*Learning how to make tasty healthy food that I actually like/w
*Batch meal preperation
*Fast /day week or other types of stricter fasts once I can easily do 8/16
*Trying to limit junkfood rather than cut it out alltogether to try and have more predictable control over it
These are it so far but I’m happily open to more! I’m kind of averse to 2-4 for just the plain ol fact that I don’t enjoy cooking (or eating my own) for that matter when my parent’s lovely meals are right near by but I might just have to cop that L if I want to get through this. It’s not entirely miserable but the temptation of high flavour foods seems like it’ll feel forever like denying myself.
Thank you again to everyone!

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