Are there any weight trending apps that take TOM into account?
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It doesn't seem like what you need exists, but every weight tracker I've ever used has the option to remove logged days. Your best bet might be to go back and remove the higher weights that you know are just retained water so they don't mess with your trend.
Ooh! Now that I hadn’t thought of. I’ll go give that a shot
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Once you know you're having your period you can adjust weightgrapher to superimpose instead of 28 days some other number of days that would take you back to your previous period. This lets you compare the same TOM to your previous one.
I don't know of anything that can predict what may have caused a sudden weight gain other than a "self check"
Yesterday I was suddenly up 2lbs, which for me is usual. So I sat there considered how much I had eaten and how much I was in the red. Considered that my legs were hurting and I had gone out for a two hour hill walk after midnight. Checked my log and recalled I had swiped a couple of slices of pizza and decided that it was unlikely to be a gain of more than 0.1lbs and that I will continue monitoring it today!1 -
Once you know you're having your period you can adjust weightgrapher to superimpose instead of 28 days some other number of days that would take you back to your previous period. This lets you compare the same TOM to your previous one.
Ooh, that might be a usable workaround. I’ll look into that. Thanks 1 -
Most of the trending apps I've seen tend to use moving averages to smooth data. I wonder if any have experimented with using standard deviations to remove noise instead (requiring weight to be beyond +/- x stddev to plot a new point (and then just connecting the points).1
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Why don't you put a note in Libra that you have TOM on those weigh in days? I put a note in mine for that plus for "salty meals" so I can understand any spikes and not freak out over them.
Besides it's the overall trend that matters not a few days. If you are still in a deficit you should still see a downward trend regardless of TOM.3 -
Hey OP. I'm not sure id this woukd help but in Libra you can adjust the smoothing and trending day limits. What if you set it for a 15 day trend and a longer smooth? Then havung two weeks of off data woukdnt throw it?0
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TavistockToad wrote: »Don't weigh yourself for that week or 2 weeks?
Great idea. Now, how do you suggest I tell exactly which week or two weeks I shouldn’t weigh myself for?
If you don't know which week or weeks to ignore, how do you expect a trending app to know?5 -
Why want a 'weight app" to exclude your TOM, the water weight is part of your 'weight' regardless if you are on your period or not.
Yes, but it’s guaranteed to go away again in another week or two. Which would not be true if it were fat weight; that, I would have to lower my calories and work to lose. I’m basically looking for something that I can point the paranoid bits of my hindbrain to and say ‘there there, this is the real figure, don’t worry, you’re still on track’These apps are not that fancy, so maybe you can setup something using excel?
Probably, and that’s what I thought of doing first. And then I thought, ‘wait, maybe something like that already exists, if anyone’s likely to know it’s the guys on MFP’. You’d think I’d have learned better than to hope for a simple answer to a simple question on here by now!
Last time I tried that was when I wanted to check a ballpark estimate for calories burned in uphill hiking; I got about ten ‘answers’ that ranged from disbelief that I’d done the hike at all to recommending that I spend money I don’t have on a Fitbit. It’s so weird, and I’ve never seen this level of ‘helpiness’ on any other forum!
But thanks, it looks like the short answer I was looking for is basically that nothing of that nature exists already, so I should either do it myself or continue living without it. So it goes
There is no way for an app to know or accurately predict how much of your gain is water and how much is actual fat -- it doesn't know how your calorie intake is related to your calorie expenditure on any given day. And it can't know about all the factors extraneous to TOM that might be affecting your water retention or how long any of them will last. You don't have an app problem. You have an expectations problem.7 -
callsitlikeiseeit wrote: »2- what you want doesnt exist. we can not MAKE it exist.
And had the first couple of responses to my post been ‘what you want doesn’t exist’, I wouldn’t be frustrated.
But they weren’t, were they? They weren’t anything nearly so helpful. Because telling a person “You don’t have the problem you say you do” and “You need something completely different from what you say you need” is not helpful, it’s actually patronising and insulting.
Why do you expect me to be pleasant about being patronised and insulted?3- A scale, ANY scale does not know if it is up 5 pounds because you pigged out for 5 days straight and ate everything in sight, or if its fluid retention.
And that is why it would be nice if there were an app that could recognise the monthly pattern of weight gain just before the period that is common in menstruating people. It wouldn’t require a particularly complex algorithm. But if it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist.5- none of it matters. If its TOM of month, you probably know that, and as (I will assume) a fully functioning adult with the ability to detect basic patterns regarding your body, YOU should know if the scale jumps up for seemingly no reason (no change in diet, no over eating, no new workouts or workout intensity changes) that, chances are, Aunt Flo is popping in soon to say hi, and to disregard the little numbers on the scale for the next 2 weeks.
Yes, I do know that. I know spiders are harmless, too. Doesn’t prevent me getting twitchy about either thing, though, because that’s not how the human mind works.
But thanks for taking the time to actually answer my question, in amongst the rest. If only more people tried that as a first resort, rather than a last one!
But that's not even what you're asking for. You're asking for an app that recognizes and predicts when your body is not adhering to the regular monthly pattern of weight gain but are in fact deviating from it because of a late menstrual flow.
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TavistockToad wrote: »
...so when it fails to predict a late period, I’ll be skipping weighing for the wrong weeks. Won’t that be helpful.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. You track your period so you know when it's late. Don't weigh when it's late.5 -
I don't think you're thinking about trending app correctly. It's not that the app decides what is a fluctuation and what isn't, it's just the law of averaging. Mathematically, it is using a formula that accounts for the last x days, sounds like about 2 weeks. So a 2-day or 7-day change doesn't affect it as much as a 10 or 14 day change. The way the trending app helps is that you can see the monthly pattern so you know it's a predictable fluctuation, not a long term gain. Over the course of 3 weeks, you would still see a loss. Happy Scale shows green or red shading based on where you're at compared to a month ago. If it bothers you that much, you could just a enter a lower weight than your scale shows on the days you "know" it's just a temporary TOM gain.
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