I used to Beemind my weight in the normal way, by having a slowly decreasing line and trying to maintain a little loss every day. This didn’t work for me because when I was close to derailing I’d just stop weighing myself. Stopping weighing myself was the worst outcome because I’d slowly lose track of my weight and when I got it back together to stand on my scales I’d have put on several kilos.
So now I just set a ceiling that I don’t want my weight to go above. It’s a weight goal with a rate of zero ending on December 30th. When Christmas and New Year roll around I’ll be close to the ceiling and I’ll know it’s time to, if not start losing weight, at least stop gaining it. It’s worked well for the last few years.
My weight has gone down by a little every year so I usually lower the ceiling by a bit in Winter. To do this I set the deadline to a week from now, set the new ceiling as my goal and add a reminder in my calendar to reset the goal date to a year ahead (at the end of the week). It’s a bit error prone. Is there a better way to make a new ceiling and not wait for the line to slowly lower? Like a retrorachet but with a value I decide myself.
I had this problem as well until I finally listened to @bee and @adamwolf who’d been telling me to make an auxiliary weigh-ins goal. Now I have to not only keep my weight on track but also weigh in most days. It always seemed like an inelegant hack and I wanted the weight goal itself to handle everything and maybe we’ll figure out how to do that but in the meantime the combination of weight and weigh-ins works like a charm. And both are automated thanks to Withings and an IFTTT applet (and a custom goal with aggday=nonzero so I can’t build safety buffer by weighing in multiple times).
Is https://road.beeminder.com/ now the best way to set a new level for a goal or is there another, better way? I’m guessing that since it has an official beeminder URL that it’s finished and integrated.
Semi-integrated and doubtless updated a bit since the thread began, but as you’ll have discovered by now it’s the substantially that same road editor with a better, more official URL.
If you didn’t have any luck in using it, do email support and we’ll set your 2020 road up in return for a user-experience report. (Or even without a report, but we’re always glad of the opportunity to learn about confusing or helpful things)
Thanks, I set my goal to a new level and everything is working fine. The way to reset it was confusing and stressful though. It took a while to figure out (or remember) that I need to have a new point at the current date with the old value (to keep the road level up to the current date) before I added in a new level. So to get a new level I needed to add in three points, one around now at the old level, one a week later at the new level and a third one in a year at the new level.
The need to click from Graph to Editor isn’t that obvious and the drop-down for which goal you’re editing is easy to miss. I didn’t try to figure out what all the options on the left are, I just used the “ins” button to add in new points.
Even with all that criticism I much prefer it to the old way I had to do this. The most difficult part now will be staying under the new weight over Christmas.