Zero net calories PPR

Sorry if this has been I’ve been asked before. I’ve found somewhat similar questions, but nothing that’s quite the same.

I’ve been using a “do less” goal to track something similar to net calories. Basically, I set a daily calorie target that I know will allow me to lose weight at a rate that I’m comfortable with. Each day, I log in Beeminder my daily “net”, based on this. For example, if my target is 1,700 calories per day and I eat 1,800 calories, then I enter +100. If I eat 1,500 calories, then I enter -200.

Issue 1: I have had my “commitment” for this goal set to 100. Thus, If I don’t track/enter my calories on a day, I get a PPR of 200. I’ve felt that this was not really enough. On a day that I don’t track calories, I most likely went over by WAY more than 200 calories, so it’s not really discouraging enough.

Issue 2: Today, I decided that my commitment of 100 calories over my target was too lenient, so I changed it to 0 (so that I’m not “allowed” to eat more than my target calories). However, I then noticed that this changed my PPR to only 1, and now with the buffer I’ve built up, it says I have a 3-YEAR buffer! That won’t do, of course.

Questions: Is there any way to customize my PPR amount, so that I can make it something that more accurately represents the “badness” of failing to track my calories for the day? If not, what would be a better way to do this?

Before anyone suggests it, I already thought of making my calorie target artificially low, and increasing my commitment number to make up the difference, so that double that is a reasonable PPR. However, I really don’t want to do that, as it makes my calorie tracker look wrong, and it would be giving me incorrect numbers as far as how many calories I have left for the day.

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For several of my goals, I ‘manually’ add my own PPR datapoints each morning. Any datapoint with a comment that contains the magic string #THISWILLSELFDESTRUCT will, um, self destruct and be deleted when any other data is added for the day.

I’ve got a little script running on my mac to do this (using LaunchControl), but you could equally set something up using Make.com.

It won’t change the calculated buffer, but would let you see the effect of a +1000 day (or whatever PPR value you choose).

Among other things, this approach sorts the goal to the top of my gallery, which reminds me to enter data.

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