For those of us who geek out over data . . . .

I had an interesting discussion on Connect last week about how to differentiate blips versus trends when at goal. One of the suggestions related to comparing your daily weight to your trend. Since I’ve got that data, and since it’s the kind of exercise I enjoy - here’s what I’ve found.

The blue line and green line are my 2022 daily weights, measured against the axis on the left. The blue is the daily result, and the green is the fourteen day moving average of the daily result. The pinkish line is how much each daily weight varied from the fourteen day moving average, and it’s measured against the axis on the right. The solid black horizontal line is where the daily weight is two pounds over the fourteen day average, and it’s here for what will become apparent later.

When you get past the visual noise, you can see that when I'm losing - when the fourteen day moving average is headed down - that variance in pink is generally two pounds or less. When that variance between daily weight and the fourteen day moving average is over +2, my weight is headed up and is continuing to climb.

So what do I take from this? When my variance between daily weight and the fourteen day moving average is over +2, that ain’t no blip. It’s time to intervene, and change behavior. If I had consistently intervened at that point over the past year, I’d be at goal already.

I suspect this will look a bit different in maintenance, but it’s an interesting little piece of data to leverage.

Interesting, no? (No, that’s not a poll question; this is where you note sagely . . . )