The trend weight is a smoothed actual weight. If you don't drink as much water as you should, your weight might go down more rapidly than what is actually represented by the fat loss. The opposite can happen as well. Had I been going off of my scale weights, I would have been ecstatic that I had lost 4.5 pounds in 2 days. Then I would have been depressed about having gone up 2.5 pounds over the next two days. Up and down is a recipe for failure.

Instead the trend weight only goes up or down a little bit to more accurately reflect reality. I believe the formula goes something like this:

Yesterday your trend weight was 200 pounds. Today your scale weight is 196 pounds. The difference between the two is 4 pounds. 10% of four pounds is 0.4 pounds. So your trend weight will go down by 0.4 pounds to 199.6 pounds.

In other words, the scale weight line will pull the trend weight line towards it. The further the scale weight line is from the trend weight line, the harder it will pull.

The concept is based upon the Hackers Diet. Easy read. The spreadsheet is something Jon Thysell created and I just downloaded it from his site. You need to have a free program called OpenOffice to use it.