Seven-day rolling means and why weekly readings mislead posts 61–90

Marking my place. If it changes for me I will come back and say so.

Weighing daily and reporting weekly is a better protocol than weighing weekly, because it separates the measurement frequency from the reporting frequency.

The interesting part of this is the exception, and I do not understand the exception.

What I would want before treating seven-day rolling as settled: the method, the sample, and whether anyone tried to find the opposite result. Two of the three are usually missing.

Reading back through the seven-day rolling threads from last year, the same three questions come up every time and only one of them has ever been answered properly. That seems like a documentation gap rather than a knowledge gap.

I read post #62 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.

A single scale used throughout beats a more accurate scale introduced halfway through. Consistency beats accuracy for a trend.

The evidence for this is thinner than the way I have phrased it suggests.

Small correction to my own earlier position on seven-day rolling. I had the units the wrong way round, which changes the conclusion by an order of magnitude and therefore changes it entirely.

On seven-day rolling: the maintained page in the documentation commons covers the general case with citations and a review date, which is more reliable than any reply here including this one.

The best progress reports here read as records rather than as arguments, and that difference is visible within a sentence.

Adding the boring version of seven-day rolling, because the interesting version keeps getting posted and the boring one is usually right.

Check the ordinary explanations, in order, and stop when one of them accounts for what you are seeing. Most of the time the second one does.

Post #69 is the version of this I will quote in future. One addition.

Seasonal patterns: some people report weight loss is slower in winter than summer. Body composition and activity changes might contribute. Noting the season is useful context.

State the method before the numbers. Same scale, same time of day, same conditions — without that a series is a collection of readings rather than a measurement.

I have left out the parts I could not verify.

Where I part company with post #70, and it is a narrow parting.

The arithmetic on seven-day rolling is the easy part and it is where the errors are, which is an uncomfortable combination. Show your working and someone will catch it.

Adding the measurement that post #72 says would settle it.

Non-scale victories: muscle gain or maintenance, clothing fit, energy level, and capability (like climbing stairs without breathlessness) are measurements that scale-based weight misses.

Worth stating the null on seven-day rolling before we explain it: the observation may be nothing. That possibility deserves a sentence and usually does not get one.