The Hacker's Diet - Forecasting

At the beginning of the Hacker's Diet, I started a tab in my excel spreadsheet called "Forecast". I plotted a line that assumed the loss of a single pound each week. At the time it seemed like kind of a crazy, optimistic idea that one might undertake with only blind optimism as one's guide.

And initially, the Forecast chart didn't seem to give me much, but it gave me something to look at while the hunger gnawed at my gut.

However, now that about 10 weeks have passed the graph looks like of cool. Check it out.


The blue line is the one-pound-a-week forecast line. Obviously its going to be a straight line, right?

The green line is the actual weight on the scale every Monday for the last 10 weeks. Taking a one-week measure kind of has the same effect of a moving average.

The orange line (in the middle) is the Hacker's Diet Trend Line (see my previous blog entry). I shouldn't be, but I'm surprised at how straight the trend line is.

So this graph allows us to compare two different types of moving averages -- the exponentially-weighted smoothing average with a period of 20 (orange) versus the crude green sampling every 7 days. The green line is more accurate but the orange line provides us with a better way to forecast. The green line appears to lead the orange line by about 10 days (or 1.5 lbs or so). Very interesting. Even better, the green line leads the blue "forecast" line by 2.5 lbs, which means I'm ahead of schedule.

We're going to Las Vegas again next month (don't try to break into my place, there will be someone there), and according to the forecast, I'll be 19 lbs lighter than when I started my diet. How cool is that? Then I might look better than this picture from earlier this year.

Yeah that's me the fatty on the left