Libra weight loss app

When you say "go by" the trend weight, what do you mean? In what manner are you using the weight value, such as:

* To put into MFP (or a fitness tracker) as your current weight
* To tell yourself or others how much weight you've lost, or what your current weight is
* To decide whether you're (losing, maintaining, gaining)
* To estimate your weight loss rate (pounds/kg per week kind of thing)
* . . . or something else?

Generally, I'd use my scale weight for most of the above, and just look at the weight trend to see where I seem to be heading overall, over time (but even the trend can be wrong, sometimes, IME).

It's pretty normal for your scale weight to be above or below the trend now and then. The trend is just a projection using a particular type of moving average, not a crystal-ball insight.

zfitgal wrote: »

I had high cortisol levels for awhile and I was dealing with alot of stress...I wanted to see if was I able to lose weight now. In general I don't use a scale or care about the numbers. I just want to make sure it's going down.

If you just want to make sure it's going down, then you probably just want to pay attention to whether the projection into the future is slanting downward from left to right, and not worry too much about whether your current weigh-in is above or below that line.

One caveat: The slower the loss rate, the more likely there'll be periods whether the slant of the trend projection is *inaccurate*. If you haven't reset any of the default settings, it's using the most recent 7 days' weigh-ins to estimate the trend. If you happen to have a week that scale weight jumps up above the trend line for multi-day periods for reasons having nothing to do with calories, then the projection line will likely shift direction. The reason for the higher weigh-ins might be new exercise, head cold/allergies or other minor injury/illness, unusually salty food for a while, hormone cycle, or generally anything that pushes up water retention for a while, or increases average digestive system contents in transit (such as more fiber, more water).

If your plan is to lose *slowly*, consider going into "Advanced Preferences" (under "Settings") and increasing the "Forecast Days". (You can play with those settings to see what they do, and look at your graph between experimental changes. It doesn't change anything about the data you've input, it just changes how it uses that data. If you put the settings back where they started, everything will look just like it did before you made changes.) However, changing the settings to more days will also make it less likely to pick up on a genuine up-trend quite as quickly. Gotta find the right balance for your situation.

In case it might be of interest to you, I wrote a post about the effect of the Libra settings, in a situation of slow loss, here:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10806565/fun-with-my-trending-app#latest

If anyone else is reading, and has a trending app other than Libra: Other apps don't necessarily let you manipulate the formulas in this way, and even if they did, the name of the settings would certainly be different.

I use my trend weight for just about everything. If I let myself claim the lows, I will have to also use the highs. I would rather use the trend. Just how I like it.

lorrpb wrote: »

The Libra trend weight always lags your current actual weight.

All weight trend apps will lag your weight when heading in a single direction and will lag during weight direction changes but will accurately reflect both soon after the fact and within a reasonable time frame. Unless you go behind their back and made significant changes to the app defaults!

It is sort of the point... to lag a bit and thus show you the actual underlying trend as opposed to instantly reacting to every single scale fluctuation whether it is meaningful or not.