cool new tool

As I've mentioned before, I'm an everyday weigher. Though my official weigh-in day is Wednesday, I pretty much step on the scale every morning. I like to think doing so helps keep me on track. We've also established that I love me some weight loss graphs.

The homepage I use iGoogle. iGoogle allows you to customize your page with all sorts of RSS feeds. I have all the blogs I read in Google Reader, CNN and MSNBC headlines, People headlines, and the "Dinner Tonight" recipe of the day from Cooking light, along with Google Maps and a clock and a calendar. And now I also have The Google 15. It rocks!

Basically, you enter your weight every single day, and the Google 15 calculates your "Moving Average" for your weight. According to the makers of the Google 15,

"The Google 15 encourages you to get on the scale every day by calculating a moving average from your daily weight. We then plot this average alongside your daily scale weight and a goal weight that you set--this gives you a better idea of your weight trend by masking most of the day to day noise that variances in water weight introduce."

So basically, if you suddenly gain 3 pounds overnight...you shouldn't sound the alarms because your weight trend is still holding steady.

I took a screenshot so you could see what I mean. (I also erased the "tens" column of my weight so you couldn't see my actual weight...not that you were curious or anything.) As you can see, I'm kind of a "go crazy on the weekends kind of girl" as noted by my trip to get Mexican food and having weekend guests where I didn't track my points. But what you can also see is that, despite the inevitable weight gain, overall I'm maintaining a weight slightly under my "goal" weight (though it is trending ever-so-slightly higher).

It really has helped keep things in perspective. Those "Whoa Nelly!" mornings that suddenly jump up are really not-so-bad when you look at them in the big picture.

Plus, it's a graph...what's not to love about some hard-core graphing?