What a spreadsheet gets right
A spreadsheet is yours. It opens on any computer, and you can add a column the day you think of one. Writing weigh-ins down at all is worth something: a systematic review covering 17 longitudinal studies found that people who weighed themselves regularly tended to lose more, and the habit wasn’t tied to more depression or anxiety (Zheng et al., 2015).
The trouble starts after the first few months, when the sheet stops being a list and starts doing math. Before Balance Point existed, we tracked weight in spreadsheets for eight years, and two problems turned up in them again and again.
Gaps get filled by hand
Weigh-ins stop during a trip or a busy month. When they resume, the sheet has a hole, and a chart with a hole looks broken. The easy fix is to type in a number somewhere between the last reading before the gap and the first one after it.
That cell is now a guess stored in exactly the same format as a measurement. Every average and chart that reads the column treats it as real. A year later, nobody remembers which cells were typed from the scale and which were typed to make the line look smooth, and the history can’t be untangled.
Straight-line goal dates swing
The usual goal-date formula takes the pounds left and divides by the recent rate. With 30 lb to go, at 1 lb/wk the formula says 30 weeks, 0.5 lb/wk says 60, and 0.2 lb/wk says 150. A single noisy week can move a short-window rate across that whole span, so the date lurches from spring to the following year and back.
A straight line also treats today’s rate as permanent. Under a steady routine the rate tapers as weight drops, and NIH modeling estimates the body takes years to settle fully at a new weight once intake shifts for good (Hall et al., 2011). A line drawn from early weeks lands too soon, and one drawn from a slow month can run off the end of the chart.
Restarting splits the history
Most long-running weight records have restarts in them. The tempting move is a fresh tab or a new file with a new goal, which leaves the old attempt sitting somewhere else. Editing the goal cell in place is worse, because the previous goal disappears and old charts quietly redraw against a number you never aimed for.
What gets lost is context, such as which pace felt sustainable and what was happening around the last stall. That material helps set a realistic pace for the next plan, and after a restart it usually sits in a file that rarely gets opened.
If you keep a spreadsheet, keep these
- One row per real weigh-in. Date it and leave days with no reading empty.
- A notes column. Travel or a new medication explains a lot when you read the sheet back a year later.
- A separate goal log. Record each goal and each change to it along with the day it changed, so older goals stay readable after you set a new one.
- Rates over several weeks. Compute the rate across a month or more, and treat any goal date as a rough window of weeks or months.
With that structure, every attempt can share one file, and a restart becomes a new row in the goal log.
Moving from a spreadsheet to Balance Point
A spreadsheet comes across as a CSV file. Export the sheet with a date column and a value column (dates as 2024-01-15 or 1/15/2024), add an optional third column naming the metric if it also holds body fat or waist readings, and open it from Import CSV or archive in Settings. Blank cells are skipped instead of read as zero, a row the app can’t read is named by its row number, and a preview shows the counts and any duplicates before anything is added. Weigh-ins that already land in Apple Health from a smart scale come in through the Apple Health connection with their original dates.
Balance Point was built to answer the problems above. Gaps stay empty, and nothing estimated ever becomes a weigh-in. The trend is computed across a gap when you look at it, and its range opens up where readings thin out. Forecasts come as a range, and none appears when the weigh-ins can’t support one. A plan starts from the trend value at the first actual weigh-in of the campaign, and restarting keeps one lifetime record with past campaigns you can browse and compare. The about page tells more of the story behind it.