Six months in: what the chart does not show

The chart on the progress page shows a line going down across six months. Read quickly, it looks like a decision followed by a result. That is not what it was like from the inside, and the gap between the two is worth writing down.

The three weeks in March

From the second week of March to the first week of April, the line does not move. Not upward, which would at least have been something to react to. It sat within four hundred grams of the same number for nineteen days.

I had not changed anything, and that was the problem. The same routine had produced steady results for eleven weeks and then produced nothing. From inside a stall there is no way to tell whether you are on a plateau or whether the thing has quietly stopped working.

What got me through it was the log rather than any particular resolve. I could look back and see that the same thing had happened in January for eight days, and that I had not noticed at the time because I was not measuring often enough to see it.

What the chart cannot record

• The fortnight I stopped logging altogether, and the two kilograms that came back during it.
• Every meal I estimated generously because the honest number was inconvenient.
• That most of the decline happened in the first ten weeks, and everything after that was slower than I had budgeted for.

None of that fits on an axis. The chart is still the most useful thing here, because it is the only part that does not flatter me. But it is a summary, and summaries leave things out.

A trend line is evidence. A single reading is a measurement with noise in it.

If you are staring at a flat stretch right now: check whether it is longer than the last one you survived. Mine never was.