Tag: weight loss

Imagine if signing up for Beeminder meant committing to use Beeminder. As part of signing up, you’d create a meta goal measuring the number of total datapoints added on all your other goals. Now the clock would be ticking to get an object-level goal created and to start adding data to it! That vision...

Today’s post (content warning: weight loss) was inspired by Jacob Falkovich and David B. Clear. First, an update on my previous weight loss post from back in April, Alliterative Alimentation. I’d only been doing that for a couple months then and it’s now been over 6 months and it continues to go swimmingly....

Want to hear my latest weirdo approach to diet? Probably you do, out of morbid curiosity at least. My goal in concocting this was to implement something a bit like intermittent fasting as a weight management strategy, and also to nudge my eating in a healthier direction. Also I like alliteration. More...

What appalling apostasy is this? It’s not like that! Beeminder just isn’t quite perfect for absolutely everything. It’s *practically* perfect for absolutely everything. Practically perfect for a surprising breadth of things? This post just happens to be about the exceptions. It’s a sequel to both the...

Look what we found in the attic! Our original Support Czar, Chelsea — known for such classics as “Beemind Easy Things” and “Weasel Heart-To-Heart” — wrote this screed in 2017. It was a much better screed when she wrote it, because Beeminder was way worse then than it is today. (Yay!) So we modernized...

Sometimes Beeminder goals have loopholes, like you could dehydrate yourself to get your datapoint below the bright line on your weight-loss graph (please don’t!). There are plenty of things like that and I probably shouldn’t think too hard about more examples. Sometimes loopholes like that can ruin...

If you’re just tuning in, and if you care about this for pragmatic rather than philosophical reasons, you’ll want to start with (or stick with) our announcement that we have fully killed off auto-widening yellow brick roads. This is the part where we philosophize about why this is a good idea. Equivalently:...

In which we explain how a big feature of early Beeminder, auto-widening yellow brick roads, was wrong-headed and what we’re doing now instead. This is Part 1 with Just The Facts and the probably-very-safe-assumption that you don’t care about the convoluted history and just want to know how your graphs...

Ok, there’s “technically” and there’s “technically”. If your definition of a vegetarian is “someone who never eats meat” then I’m pretty stuck on making good on this title. But someone who ate meat in the past and doesn’t anymore counts, of course. So maybe there’s wiggle room here? Someone who eats meat...

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth and derailing on a Beeminder goal meant getting a week of respite. That is still in fact the default. After derailing you get a week of safety buffer. It gives you time to re-evaluate how the goal is working, and time to adjust your Yellow Brick...

First, this guest post is an absolute inspiration and we implore you to read it. We’ve talked about Brent Yorgey before in press roundups but we’ll assume you don’t read those and repeat our gushing in this introduction. If you don’t know him, Professor Yorgey is well-known in the Haskell community and...

This is going to start out sounding super common-sensical but will leap to a characteristically preposterous-sounding conclusion that I, characteristically, actually believe. Not as preposterous-sounding as, say, beeminding bites, but still. The obvious part is that if you have food left on your plate...

We know this is going to read like an April Fool’s joke to plenty of you. [UPDATE: To clarify, “bites” means mouthfuls, not like up-and-down motions of your jaw! Hopefully that makes this all slightly less bonkers sounding.] Like, how is it not impossibly tedious to keep track of how many bites of food...

It’s almost New Year’s Day! Since I am both an eternal optimist and obsessed with productivity tips / planner Instagram / life improvement stories, this is my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE holiday of the year. For the last week or so, I’ve spent a decent amount of time fantasizing about how I will turn into a better...

This was tied for the most popular topic for us to write about in a mini straw poll of the daily beemail readers. I decided to blog it instead because a surprising number of people have proposed this over the years (also it’s a blog beemergency day). Beeminder users being, to put it mildly, rather sophisticated,...

Another official integration! We’re so excited to be integrating with Garmin, one of the biggest and oldest names in wearable computey things! As a welcome to Garmin users new to Beeminder, we’ll start with our usual recap. If you’re just eager to get your beloved Garmin device connected to Beeminder,...

Another official integration! We’re so proud to be one of a handful of launch partners for Epson’s entry into the Quantified Self / wearables market: Runsense and Pulsense. As a welcome to Epson users new to Beeminder, we’ll start with our usual recap. For Beeminder regulars who don’t already know about...

When I first introduce people to Beeminder, they either recoil in horror or they want to dive right in. But the easiest way to defeat a new system is to overload it [1], so if you read this blog post and then immediately create a bunch of goals, I’ve probably failed. There are two obvious ways to overload a system: volume and intensity. In Beeminder terms, volume is creating more goals than you’re able to keep current, and intensity is setting too aggressive a slope. You might want to lose

This is crossposted on the Fat Cyclist blog. Greetings not-so-fat cyclists! We’re pretty much beside ourselves with how the first annual (oh presumption!) Beeminder Fat Cyclist Weight Loss Competition turned out. When we say we’re beside ourselves we mean that literally — Beeminder is a husband-and-wife...

I’ve been thinking about beeminding weight loss a lot lately and the thing is, beeminding weight loss sucks! But not any more than losing weight in general sucks. Even for people who really like the whole commitment device craziness, Beeminder sometimes feels aversive. I believe that happens when you...

With the Fat Cyclist weight loss competition underway, we're thinking about weight loss a lot. We've got some useful posts planned. In the meantime, we have Bethany hating on

My mom recently lost $5,000 to my brother in a commitment contract gone wild. That was started in part as an experiment early in Beeminder’s beta period before we’d thought of things like the exponential pledge schedule. Believe it or not, it was actually a pretty positive outcome: my mom gradually...

If you’re fitness savvy you know that you should be gaining muscle as you lose fat. So isn’t focusing on body weight silly, since muscle is denser than fat and ultimately we all want to be svelte and strong and lean, like a jungle cat? Maybe you have a fancy scale that tells you what really matters

Here’s a question from a user: “Sometimes it seems like a hard workout makes me gain weight. My question is: WTF?” Melanie, Beeminder’s resident fitness expert, has an answer: Temporary weight gain for a day or two after a hard workout is common. Your body is storing glucose — quick energy

This is a guest post by Josh Jordan. While waiting for a Beeminder beta account, I tried using StickK to help me lose some fat. StickK is a brilliant concept and I hope they succeed in a big way, but I don’t like their weekly weigh-ins, for two reasons: It’s way too easy to temporarily and unhealthfully...

Here’s a blindingly obvious insight: if you drive blind you’ll probably drive off the road. Less obvious is that that applies almost as certainly to your Beeminder yellow brick road. Michelle, who has very thick skin (figuratively speaking!) and agreed to let us feature her here, illustrates the point...

Continuing the theme from our last post, this is a guest post by Beeminder beta user Kevin McGowan. I am not an expert of any kind and I have no training. I’m just a guy who used to be pretty uncomfortable (5’10” 230lbs) and now is a much happier 175lbs. Danny thought the lifestyle changes I used to make...

Here’s a simple yet powerful weight loss tip: Don’t eat when you don’t want to. I mean, maybe you shouldn’t always eat even when you do want to but at the very least don’t eat when you don’t want to. Like because it’s there, you’re bored, or to prevent being hungry later. If you have other tips and tricks,...

Here’s the bottom line on weight loss: unless more calories are being used than consumed, no weight loss will happen. There’s no magic. There is plenty of confusion and struggle, however. Simply eating less backfires and it’s because of hormones. Your body really doesn’t want your weight to change. Oh,...