Caspian Healthcare › Obesity › Free tools › Track progress
The scale lies to you daily. Your body stores a few hundred grams of glycogen, and glycogen is stored together with several times its own weight in water, so a kilogram or two can arrive and leave in three days without a gram of fat changing hands. This shows you the trend underneath, and tells you what the published checkpoints actually are.
Saved on this device only, in this browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, there is no account, and we cannot see it. Clear your browser data and it is gone, so export the file occasionally if it matters to you.
Pale dots are what the scale said. The line is the seven day average, which is the one worth looking at.
Add your first entry above. Weigh yourself first thing in the morning, after the toilet, before eating, wearing about the same thing each time.
Privacy. Everything you type into the tools in this section is worked out inside your own browser and stays on your own device. Nothing is sent to us, nothing is stored on any server, and nobody at the clinic sees it. Close the page and it is gone.
These are the strongest, cleanest findings in this whole area, and almost nobody is told them.
| Point | Threshold | What missing it means |
|---|---|---|
| Month 1 | 2% | Missing it made falling short at one year about 5.6 times more likely. But 15 out of every 100 who missed it still got there. |
| Month 2 | 3% | More discriminating: missing it made falling short about 11.6 times more likely. Only 8 in 100 who missed it still got there. |
| Week 12 | 5% | The formal decision point in the Endocrine Society guideline for anyone on medication. Below 5 per cent at three months, the recommendation is to change the approach rather than continue. |
Read a missed checkpoint correctly. The authors of the study these thresholds come from concluded that the early months are the best opportunity to modify the plan, not a prediction of failure. Nobody should ever be told by a website that they will fail. What a missed checkpoint means is: come back sooner, and change something now while changing it is still easy.
Daily, for most people. In a randomised trial, people who weighed every day lost about 6 kg more than those who did not, and adopted more weight control behaviours. A cohort of 10,000 smart scale users found that only daily weighing was associated with weight loss across every BMI group.
With one important exception. Daily weighing is not right for everyone, and there is published evidence of harm in some people, particularly around mood and preoccupation. If anything on the eating pattern checklist rang true for you, weigh weekly or not at all, and say so at your appointment. Getting this wrong makes people worse.
Weight loss slows and then stops, usually somewhere around month six. This is normal, expected and not a sign that anything has gone wrong.
Two things contribute. Your body genuinely needs fewer calories now that it is smaller. And modelling work suggests that in most real world plateaus, small unnoticed drifts in intake are the larger part of the explanation, because with genuinely perfect adherence the models predict loss continuing for twelve months or more.
Nobody can tell you which of the two it is from your weight data alone, and this tool will not pretend to. Separating them properly needs indirect calorimetry, and self-reported food intake is under-reported by 20 to 50 per cent in almost everyone, so a food diary cannot settle it either. What is worth doing is measuring intake carefully for two weeks and recalculating for your current, lighter body, and bringing it to a review rather than quietly cutting further on your own.
What this is and is not. This is a published screening tool, reproduced with its source named so you or any doctor can check it. It is not a diagnosis and it is not monitored by a person. Nobody at the clinic sees your answers.
Early response thresholds: Unick JL and colleagues, Look AHEAD, Obesity 2014;22:1608-1616. The 5 per cent at 12 weeks rule: Apovian CM and colleagues, Pharmacological Management of Obesity, an Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism 2015;100:342-362, recommendation 1.5. Plateau: Thomas DM and colleagues, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2014;100:787-795, and Hall KD and colleagues, Lancet 2011;378:826-837. Weekly rhythm: Orsama A-L and colleagues, Obesity Facts 2014;7:36-47. Daily weighing: Steinberg DM and colleagues, Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics 2015;115:511-518, and Vuorinen A-L and colleagues, Journal of Medical Internet Research 2021;23:e25529. Safe rate and gallstones: Weinsier RL and colleagues, American Journal of Medicine 1995;98:115-117. Glycogen and water: Kreitzman SN and colleagues, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 1992;56:292S-293S. The seven day average is a display aid, not a validated instrument.
Every number here comes from a named, published clinical trial and is reported as what happened to the people in that trial. None of it is a result from this clinic, a prediction for you, or a promise. Trial populations are selected and individual results vary widely. The trials are named in the reference line above so that you, or any doctor, can look them up.
If you want to talk about what any of it means for your own situation, our contact details and consulting hours are at the bottom of every page in this section, and our fees are published in full on the cost page.