I wanted to ask about this for awhile but never got around to it. To quote @dreev:
In general, we need two daily metrics: one to measure your objective and one to measure what you’re doing to achieve it. The first we call your gauge and the second we call your dial.
So for weight loss, I would use my weight as my gauge and something like net calories as my dial.
The idea is that the strictness of your dial metric (adhering to some net calorie goal) is dependent on how well you’re doing in your gauge metric. So if your weight starts trending up toward the red line, you’d need to eat less/burn more to counter act.
The blog post seemed like a great idea and it was implemented in a spreadsheet, but I’m not sure how to set that up in beeminder.
It seems that the slope of the dial goal would need to change based on the current value of the guage goal. But that would definitely need to be automatic to not afoul of akrasic window, right?
I’m delighted you’re into it! See also my slightly more recent post on the concept, “The Protein Dial”. I think protein percentage is worth trying as an alternative to net calories. (And possibly also waist circumference as an alternative to scale weight, the pros and cons of which we talk about in “To Weigh Or Not To Weigh”.)
I would love to get something like this more built in to Beeminder but for now you’re somewhat on your own. @bee and I are actually working on a food-tracking app for ourselves that we’re calling Memento Vori and that might have gauges&dials built in.
In any case, ideas for what to beemind for this system in the meantime:
The gauge itself (scale weight or waist circumference or whatever) of course should be its own Beeminder graph.
The dial (net calories or protein percentage or whatever) is computed as a function of your gauge. You could beemind “dial compliance” as a manual, binary do-more goal – just whether you tracked the dial metric and adhered to what the formula dictated.
Then the dial could range from like Macrofactor expenditure -500 to +3000 or something. If I’m below my goal weight then I can ignore it and if above I have to worry about it in increasing amounts.
The one thing I might try first though is not lerping the range and just having it be a yes or no.
I get a compliance data point in two cases:
I am at or under goal weight.
I am following macrofactor’s guidance.
Of course this means if I always need the guardrail I’d skate along the top of maxflux. That’s probably fine since no matter what if I’m eating above maintenence I’ll gain wait even if we lerp it.
As for protein, I haven’t really tracked it yet as eating more protein has been critical for my satiety in the cutting phase. But I looked back at my binge days and certainly they can often have very low protein… I’ll think about that approach too and maybe make a separate goal for protein!