I wrote a comment to a fellow DietBetters post, and it got a bit out of hand:

Weighing in regularly, daily preferred, is key to losing weight, contrary to popular (mal)advice. You have to constantly know where you are to make sure you are going in the right direction.

What's important though, is to realize that there's lot of noise: daily variation in body weight can be as much as 5% (or perhaps even more). To get the proper data out one shouldn't obsess on daily data (but record it nonetheless) and look at the trend of the data.

Also, one has to remember that when eating, only about a fourth of the weight eaten gets turned and stored into fat. So, if you eat 1kg of food per day, all of that will show in the scale, but only 250 grams are really deposited.

Add to that water weight daily fluctuations and really, the scale might scare you a bit some days, but when you just focus on the data and the trend of that data, you'll start to see the big picture and know exactly where you are and what should be done.

Depends on the caloric content of the food of course, but as a rough estimate it should be around the ballpark.

I think I went a bit overboard with my comment. :D Sry about that. :D

For a comment to a post, it was maybe a bit too much, but at the same time, it should've been more.

I'm gonna open up a bit two points I brought up in that comment.

Weighing in daily keeps you happy

To truly know where you are going, you need to be constantly aware of where you currently are. That's why it's important to weigh yourself daily. What's problematic here is the so called signal to noise ratio, which means that focusing on the daily weight will really make you stressed. Most likely. What's needed here is the realizing the trend of the weight, and not the daily fluctuations. More about that on the great Hacker's Diet.

To get that trend out, in addition to weighing in daily, you need to record that data somewhere, and calculate the trend of the data. There are good tools available for that, I use beeminder, which is more of a commitment contract platform, and on the android app side I use Libra, which is a really nice piece of software. However, nothing beats a good old fashioned spreadsheet.

The blue jagged line is the daily weight, the yellow wobbly line is the smoothed average as a trend, and the red dotted line is my target line. The straight blue and yellow lines are builtin trend lines by LibreOffice Calc, and they are nice in that you see where you are headed quite easily. The more days pass, though, the more useless the straight trend lines are: they splice through the center of the data sets, meaning that the more there is data, the less immediate the change is per one entered value. But for now, they are quite nice at showing the way.

Here is the LibreOffice Calc -file for anyone interested.

Weight from food or calorie counting?

I made a somewhat surprising realization a few hours ago. The thing we calorie counters are interested in is usully not calories themselves, but how much of those are translated and stored in to the body. So why couldn't we count the weight gained from food instead of calories? Well, we can. I haven't seen anything about his anywhere, which is kind of weird: I'd bet others would benefit from thinking about food this way.

A small scenario, some basic unhealthy food: White bread with spread, cheese and meat. About 250 calories per 100g. There's 7700 calories in a kg stored in your body, so 770 calories in 100g. This would basically mean, that:

250/770=~0.325

This number is the amount of weight you gain per amount of food you eat. For example, if you eat 500g of this bread with those condiments on it, you'd gain:

0.325*500=~162.5g

You could precalculate and approximate a few of these for different categories of food and you'd get instant weight gain info:

To make approximation easier, we get a few helpers if we change the numbers to "close enough" fractions, for example 0.064 =~ 1/20 (0.05) or 0.194 =~ 1/5 (0.2). Dividing with whole numbers is easier, and even easier if they are related to 10 somehow, in division or multiplication. This makes it possible to calculate and approximate the weight you'd gain in your head.

For example, 500g of vegetables = 500/10/2 g of weight gain = 25g of weight. Out of 500g of weight eaten! Another example: 250g of sweets = 250/2 = 125g. HALF of weight of the sweets eaten get to be you with you for a while!

And if you want to average everything out, you get 200 calories per 100g. Which equates to 200/770=~0.260. Which is about 1/4.

Only about 1/4th of everything you eat is deposited in your body for a longer time (than the rest, which should travel through the body in 12-48hrs). That could be used as broader approximate - but remember, the more we approximate, the more we deviate from the correct results!

Good ideas need to be written twice

This was so exciting that I accidentally lost ALL the text I wrote for this blog post, and had to rewrite. I might have lost some nuances from my text in the process, but maybe my points are presented now in a bit more streamlined manner. At least I hope so.

I want to point out that I am not in any way affiliated with the companies or products I linked to. I just felt telling people about them, in case they prove useful for others as well. Spreading the love!

Also, I keep saying gaining weight when calculating how much food mass is turned to proper body weight, when in reality, one needs to also account (as it is in calorie counting as well) the needed turned into body weight per day. Which for me is 2400 (maintaining calories per day) / 7700 =~ 0.312kg. This would mean I could eat 1.2kg food per day, or if I'd eat healthy food only, 100/770=~0.130, or about 1/8, or 2.4kg food per day.

By eating healthy, I could maintain without ever feeling hungry (I'd probably feel stuffed for most of the time).

Thanks for reading this far! Any questions, feedback, corrections? Shoot me (with the comments below).