Making weight charts

It only takes a couple of minutes to make a monthly weight chart from a completed log page. It's up to you whether to update the chart every day or wait 'till the end of the month and plot all the data in one sitting. One advantage of making the chart monthly is that at the end of the month you know the weight range for the month so you don't have problems with a line running off the bottom (or, horror of horrors, the top) of the page.

To make a chart, get a piece of graph paper and draw axes at the bottom, left, and right. Mark off ticks on the bottom for every day, and ticks at the left for pounds. The right axis runs from 0 to 48 and is used to plot the rung in the exercise program you completed each day. To save time, make up a blank chart with the axes drawn in, the days of the month marked on the horizontal axis, and the rung numbers on the right, then run off a year's supply on a copier. All you have to do each month is label the weight scale on the vertical axis and plot the data. Plot both the daily weight readings and trend data on the chart, along with the exercise rung. The best way to distinguish the different lines on the chart is to draw them in different colours, for example black for daily weight, blue for the trend line, and red for the exercise rung line. Using all those different coloured pens may make you feel like a nerd, but since you aren't using a computer, it's OK. Model your hand-drawn charts after the computer-generated one on page .