+1 to the feature-request-in-passing to add plotting of numerical metadata.
I’m Beeminding a graduated fitness ladder (the one from The Hacker’s Diet)
and recording as a comment which rung I was on on a given day. It helps me
make sure that I’m pushing upward, and seeing that progress plotted would
be cool.
I agree that weight is not an ideal goal, but it’s also a very important
output that’s worth tracking.
One tangential point: I’m currently not weighing myself daily because I’m
spending 2+ weeks at my in-laws, and their old mechanical scale is wildly
inaccurate (leaning forward and backward slightly can swing my weight by
two pounds!). Therefore I’m just letting that goal go without data for a
while. The new assumed-to-gain-weight-on-no-data proposal would be a
problem here.
Braden
On Tue Dec 03 2013 at 8:05:24 AM, Jake Hofman jhofman@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 6:10 AM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:
Beeminder is indeed best for things you have direct control over.
Inputs rather than outputs. But there are 2 reasons why I think it’s
also good for weight:
hi all,
thanks for the great feedback and advice.
maybe i should drop the weight-based goal all-together, but there’s
something nice about just tracking the measurements themselves …
that said, i’ll second (or third, i suppose) the superiority of
“input” based tasks.
for instance, i found that switching from “do X pushups per day” to
“do pushups X times per week” made a big difference in my ability to
achieve and maintain my goal. the primary reason for this is probably
that i’m not good at goal setting. that said, i found that i just
needed beeminder to get me over the hump of getting into pushup
position—once i was there i did my routine and got out a good number
of pushups.
dan griped about this leading to some information loss, but i was
logging the number of pushups as metadata, so it’s all there in
theory. (side note: it’d be fun to be able to automatically plot
numerical metadata for these types of goals.)
- You can beemind weight in addition to calories or exercise or other
healthy habits that you do have direct control over. Keep the weight
loss goal very
conservative (or even flat) so that you don’t have to stress about an
expensive derailment on something hard to fully control. You can also
uncheck the auto-increasing pledges option, so it only costs $5 per
derailment (which, if the road is dialed conservatively, should be
rare anyway).
funny, btw: this is how my weight goal started a year ago—the
description was “don’t get fat over the holidays”, with a flat road.
but i soon found that monitoring led to some improved habits, and that
i was losing weight. that was the first time i really appreciated the
beauty of the adjustable road.
you can spend all day eating very little and working out a lot and you
can guarantee your weight will go down over the course of the day. In
theory that’s dangerously abusable (think wrestlers cutting weight by
dehydrating)
true, but it’s not all that fun! (i did this far too often while
wrestling in high school … losing 2lbs is easy if you simply don’t
eat for a day; losing 5lb requires some work.)
PS: Here’s another crazy idea we have, along the lines of your meta
proposal: Trello
awesome—this is pretty much exactly what i had in mind.
-j
–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.