Weight Loss Chart and Log Template

• Date - weigh at a consistent time, ideally first thing.
• Weight - exactly as displayed, no rounding. Pick kg or lbs; never switch mid-log.
• Notes - the column that does the real work: salty meal, hard workout, poor sleep, travel, alcohol, illness, day of cycle. Where every unexplained jump gets explained.

Worth adding: weekly waist circumference - it often keeps moving when the scale doesn't (see waist-to-height ratio) - and daily steps, because everyday movement falls silently during a diet.

Record immediately: numbers written an hour later drift toward what you hoped for.

One row per weigh-in:

Look at the week whole: readings bounce between 83.7 and 84.6 - a 0.9 kg spread - yet every high day has its explanation in the notes. Any single row tells a different story than the week.

Weigh under the same conditions every time; how often is its own decision - see how often you should weigh yourself.

This smaller table is where progress appears. One row each Sunday: average the week's readings, compare to last week.

Four weeks, 1.5 kg down, about 0.5% of body weight per week - inside the safe range of 0.5-1 kg (1-2 lb) per week. Week 3 looks bad and isn't - it's a normal week with a travel note. Anyone reading only the daily log spent it convinced the plan had stopped.

Keep the percentage column - it stays meaningful as you lighten and says whether you're going too fast.

Water, glycogen, gut content, hormones and salt each move the scale more in a day than fat does in a week (sizes in why your weight fluctuates daily). Three rules do the work:

1. Never compare two days - compare week to week, or this week's average to three weeks ago; single days measure water.
2. Expect a staircase, not a slope. Two good weeks, a flat one, a small rise, a drop. Treating the flat week as failure is why people quit working plans.
3. Use three to four flat weeks as your threshold. Below that, do nothing; past it, work through how to break a weight loss plateau.

Drawing by hand? Readings as dots, a line through each week's cluster - dots are weather, the line is climate. Don't scale the axis to the last two weeks: give it 10 kg, or a chart from 82 to 85 kg turns fluctuation into a mountain range.

The scale measures one thing badly and misses several entirely: if you're training, muscle gained offsets fat lost while your body visibly changes. Three additions fix that:

• Waist, weekly. Same spot, same tape, morning. It frequently keeps falling through a scale plateau.
• Photos, monthly. Same lighting, position, clothing. Nobody trusts them now; everybody finds them convincing three months later.
• How clothes fit. Unmeasurable, and often the first honest signal. Write it in the notes.

Optionally add body fat percentage: home methods aren't precise, but a consistent one shows a direction.

The template is complete: a notebook and a Sunday-evening average will run it for a year - if that's what you'll stick with, go rule some columns. A spreadsheet averages and charts for you.

Both cost upkeep, and upkeep is where logs die: averaging seven numbers every Sunday is the two-minute chore people skip in week three - and once averaging stops, the log stops meaning anything. Weight & BMI Feeltracker is free and removes that step: averages and trend lines computed for you; charts over any period; weight, BMI and body fat in one entry, kg or lbs, with goal tracking; photos on entries; reminders, widgets, Apple Health sync so a smart scale fills the log for you; export to PDF, XLSX, CSV or JSON; and iCloud sync with no account or email - plus AI insights in the free tier.

Paper, spreadsheet or app: record consistently, judge weekly, never argue with one morning. The log you keep beats the perfect one you abandon.