WeighTracker

success with less stress

About WeighTracker

WeighTracker is a website which provides free charts and indicators which give you clear, simple, realistic guidance on your diet performance and path forward to reach your weight goals. Counting calories is hard and fickle scales are demoralizing. Here calorie counting isn't required and peace with your bathroom scale can be achieved.

The most important part of the website is the current status display like the one you see to the left. You can immediately see from the direction and color of the arrow whether you're losing weight, maintaining weight, or starting to put on weight. But the arrow is just an early warning alarm. The most valuable information is the statistics underneath. The daily excess or gain let's you know how many calories too many or too little you are eating if you want to keep your weight exactly the same. Related to that number is the weekly gain/loss value. It tells you how much weight you will lose or put on if you keep eating and exercising the same amount as you are now.

The hard part about paying attention to your bathroom scale is the unpredictable ups and downs that are unrelated to your actual diet progress. This website uses a mathematical formula to smooth out these aberrations. (You can read more about the details on the History page.) The result of these calculations are used to figure out your "True Weight" which is the best approximation of what's going on underneath all the random weight fluctuations. But remember, your True Weight, whatever that might be, is a lot less important than your daily calorie excess/deficit.

You should try each day to enter your scale reading into the website. Don't worry, your weights are private and won't be shared with any users or partners. If you miss a day, just skip it in the table and the calculations will automatically work around the missing entry. You can put a short comment in for the day as well if you like. While comments don't show up on any charts, they do help you if you go back to find out where things went wrong. My comments often indicate high-calorie sugary coffee indulgences.

There are two other optional fields that you can record along with your weight. There is a "Flag" checkbox which you can use if you did poorly sticking to your diet that day. Unlike comments, these do show up on most charts as a red "X". Over the course of a month, this gives good visual feedback on how well you are sticking to your diet regimen. The other field is called the "Rung". You can enter a whole number between 1-100. This represents what rung up the exercise ladder you managed that day. You should make a personal list, starting at 1, detailing the minimum amount of exercise that still counts as exercise and work your way up. John Walker, author of "The Hacker's Diet", has laid out 48 rungs which you can use or adapt to your own needs. Your level of fitness, as indicated by the rungs, is also tracked on the charts.

You can see all these features on the chart above. Normal scale readings appear as green markers. Flagged scale readings appear as red X's. Your progression of exercise rungs is shown growing from the bottom as translucent green bars. And your "True Weight" is plotted with the brown line. Don't forget that all this is there to help you see your progress, but it is the current status information detailed earlier that is the day in and day out pulse of your diet progress.

While I'm not a big fan of the Body Mass Index (BMI), it is helpful to some people. BMI is a ratio of your weight to your height. It is a rough guide to know whether you are overweight or underweight based on your height. It does NOT give you any information about your body fat percentage. In fact, a very muscular person with a very low body fat percentage can fall in the overweight category based on BMI alone. So, be aware of it's limitations. In case you are interested, you can find your BMI on the current status display as both a number and as the body shape indicator. The body shape indicator will reflect malnourished, underweight, normal, overweight, or obese as indicated by World Health Organization standards Please note that these classifications are off for Asian populations which typically have lower BMI standards than other racial groups.

Enjoy!

Wise Words

"Water is the most neglected nutrient in your diet but one of the most vital."

- Kelly Barton

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