danlucraft's Beeminder journal

:heart_eyes: Welcome back! I love-love-love your story of edge-skating and eking your way onto your weight road by evening.

I resisted having multiple graphs for one real-world goal for a long time. @bee eventually convinced me that I needed a weigh-ins goal to go with my weight goal. I wish Beeminder had a better way but for now I think there’s no way around it. Well, one way: if you can, outside of Beeminder, commit to getting on the scale every day, even if you have safety buffer and don’t strictly have to weigh in. Maybe psychologically, or with support from friends/family, you can make avoiding the scale when you have buffer be an ice cream truck loophole – one that you’re not tempted to exploit because it would immediately decimate Beeminder’s efficacy.

Actually, maybe it’s less of an issue for you since you’re losing a full pound a week (super intense, btw!) so you’ll rarely find yourself with much safety buffer. On my nearly flat weight goal, every time I weigh in even slightly below my road I get weeks of safety buffer. If it weren’t for my secondary goal forcing me to weigh in I’d put my head in the sand and back myself into a corner.

Anyway, so for me, I’m driven by my weigh-ins goal. It’s fed automatically by Withings and IFTTT and a custom aggday, so not at all newbee-friendly. It would also work fine to manually record +1’s for weigh-ins though.

My latest strategy, which I’m realizing I’ve made sound overcomplicated in other posts and beemails, is basically to start fasting 24 hours before your deadline so you can be quite certain that you’ll weigh in on your yellow brick road in time.

Finally, quick excerpt from something @bee and I started writing that’s particularly relevant to things you’re saying here…

Bee and I both beemind our weight, fairly similarly, but in Bee’s case she feels weird and icky about it and doesn’t want to talk about it publicly. But she said it’s fine for me to talk about it, including how weird and icky it feels for her! I, in contrast, think beeminding weight is absolutely amazing and want to shout it from treetops. I think beeminding weight should be the bedrock of every weight loss system. People like me can enjoy the edge-skating and imposed random intermittent fasting. Non-ridiculous people can do Weight Watchers or go vegan or keto or paleo or, I don’t know, portion control and exercise, whatever, and just have Beeminder there keeping them honest. The goal for them is to never let Beeminder be binding. It is binding but if you let it matter that it’s binding then your non-Beemindery system failed and Beeminder is the failsafe.