marigrace brought up, in another topic, the idea of finding the weekly average and using that for your weigh in. I do all my weight loss stuff on a spreadsheet, so I figure hey! I can do this real quick like

And WOW! It makes a HUGE difference. So much so, that I HAVE to share with everyone!!!

Graph of my daily weigh in
Graph of my weekly average (every day)

It's SO easily to get discouraged by the daily weigh in graph. There doesn't appear to be a trend really, and it just shoots all over the place! But with the second graph, I can CLEARLY SEE that I'm doing SOMETHING right and the weigh IS coming off... and pretty consistently, too!!

I HIGHLY recommend anyone who uses spreadsheets to do this! You'll be amazed!!!

It's important to find a way of looking at your weight that doesn't discourage you! on finding yours.

There you go, you are no the right track! :-)

Wow, that's a really cool distinction there! One question though...are you recording several weights a day?

I absolutely agree!

I weigh myself every morning and the first thing I do on the computer is enter it in fitday.com. Your head can do really weird things with those numbers if you don't have them recorded somewhere. Up a decimal point, down a decimal point and soon you don't really know how much you weighed last week at all! But when you have a graph and that general downward trend over time ... that's encouraging.

I hope I can explain this without being confusing...

The very first point on the graph is on 1/15/2010, and that point takes ALL the weigh-ins from January 9th to January 15th, and finds the average.
The point directly after it on 1/16/2010 and that point takes ALL the weigh-ins from January 10th to January 16th.

So I'm weighing in once a day, but I'm doing it every day. The average takes the day I weigh in, and averages that day with the last seven days to give me my weekly average for that one day.

If you're good at math, it'd look like...

(D1+D2+D3+D4+D5+D6+D7)/7 = Average for D7
(D2+D3+D4+D5+D6+D7+D8)/7 = Average for D8
(D3+D4+D5+D6+D7+D8+D9)/7 = Average for D9
And so on...

Where D1 would be my first weigh in day, and D2 would be my second, and so on.

And thank you mandalinn82, Stella, and SusanB!! I love crunching numbers, and when I decided to do this... wow!! I had been so discouraged about my weight loss... who knew I was doing it right the whole time? Slowly, yes, but very steady!!