Data Analysis: Which days are helping or hurting me the most?

Even when not dieting, I eat in a very predictable way. I will go for long periods (months or years) of eating just a few different types of meals. And I have certain days of the week where I basically always eat the same thing. Thursday is taco night, Friday is movie night, Saturday is pizza, etc. Dieting, I'm eating reduced or modified versions of those same things on those same days.

I weigh myself every day and pretty quickly I noticed that I was consistently up on Sunday mornings. I'm not overeating the pizza (or not by enough to show +3lb the next day) and it fades away in a day or two. Obviously carb-related water retention must be the issue. I theorized that Friday night's dinners were probably causing me a smaller version of the same thing that I hadn't noticed yet.

I wrote a quick script to figure this out from my weigh-in data. Get the weight change from the previous day to the next day from my two months of data and label it by the day's meal that preceded the change.

Mon -9 Tue -8 Wed -6 Thu -9 Fri 5 Sat 11 Sun -8 total: -24 

(The way to read this is that the meals on Monday have contributed a total loss of 9lb measured on Tuesday mornings. The meals on Tuesday have contributed a total loss of 8lb measured on Wednesday morning, etc.)

Obviously Saturdays are killing me and Friday isn't helping much either. Hypothesis proved.

I've already started making pizza differently. For the last 2 weeks I've been using a whole wheat tortilla pre-baked for crispness. It actually comes out a lot better than I was expecting and virtually eliminates the Sunday morning weigh-in issue. Clearly I should do something similar for Friday.

submitted by /u/EpicWildlifeWarriors
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