Weight and waist tracker: sixteen weekly rows with change from start

A weekly weight is a signal. A daily weight is mostly water, salt, and what time you went to the bathroom. This sheet asks for one row a week and, once, for the method, because a tracker where week 3 was measured after breakfast in jeans and week 4 before breakfast in nothing is a tracker of clothing and coffee.

Write the method once

The header has a line for it: which scale, what time of day, what you are wearing, and the waist landmark. Do not change any of them for sixteen weeks. If the scale battery dies and you buy a new one, note the week; a step change on the sheet with a note beside it is data, and the same step without a note is a mystery.

Waist

The NHLBI's method is the simplest that is consistent: stand, put the tape around your middle just above the hip bones, and read it just after breathing out. Snug, not compressing, level all the way round. The NHLBI describes a waist of more than 40 inches for men or more than 35 inches for women as increasing risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes; that figure is printed on the sheet as context. It is not a target and it is not a diagnosis. What the waist column is for is the week the scale stalls and the tape keeps moving, which happens, and which is worth seeing.

Once a month is enough for the tape if weekly feels like too much; leave the cell blank on the other weeks rather than guessing.

Change from start

The fourth column is the current weight minus the start weight in the header, with the sign. Fill it in; the act of subtracting is what makes the trend visible. If you want it as a percentage, which is how the trials and most payers express it, divide by the start weight and multiply by 100. The prior authorization checklist explains why the percentage matters at renewal time, and the plateau checker on the weight loss site will compare your weekly rows with the published trial curves if you paste them in.

The notes column

Dose change, illness, travel, period, a week of eating out. The tracker's job is not to judge those weeks; it is to make sure that when a prescriber asks "what happened in week 9", the answer is written next to week 9.

Sixteen weeks, then another sheet

Sixteen rows fit a page at a size you can write in. Print a second sheet with the start weight carried over in the header and week 17 in the first row; the builder's start date field will fill the dates if you give it the date of week 17. The maintenance transition checklist asks you to bring the last sixteen weeks of this sheet to the conversation about what happens next.