I’ve discussed this plenty over the past year, but I do want to mark a milestone: I first started tracking my weight with a spreadsheet and a line graph on March 10, 2006. At the time, I was working at a beauty company, surrounded by people who routinely looked their best. It was motivational for me to drop the 10 extra pounds I’d been carrying—and I did, according to the chart, that October.

That round of weight loss didn’t stick, but for some reason, the spreadsheet did. I wasn’t religious about it—there are gaps in the data as long as 16 months—but I’d use it for a few weeks or months on occasion, whenever I was thinking about my weight, or just to track my life in some way (cf.). I started making a new tab every couple of years to keep it manageable. Before I knew it, I had ten years of data, and I made a decade-long graph to see what I’d been up to.

Saving you a click: I wasn’t great at weight loss. The chart revealed that what I considered my default adult weight had slipped away. And the march of time from there only made it worse. After getting thin in my late 20s and early 30s, my weight crept up, and my target became like a basketball rim, something to leap toward and touch at best. Across an 18-year span, I only got to or below my target four times, and one of those was after I got food poisoning in Mexico City. At least I was pretty good at halting weight gain, thanks in part to the tracking.

All this built to the crowning achievement of my spreadsheet. When I began modifying my diet early last year, my doctor gave me a new weight target. I had the perfect tool for tracking my progress. I didn’t even have to resurrect it: I had dropped in my weight the week before. So as I committed myself to eating right, I started weighing myself every day, and recording the results.

A side note to most humans is that obsessing over daily weight changes is not always a mentally healthy approach. One needs to understand the fluctuations and not get discouraged. I’ve had events even in at the peak of my weight loss journey where I gained 2.5 pounds in a day. The right answer in these moments, by the way, is, “Oops.” Follow an unhealthy day with a healthy one and the data resolves itself. It’s not perfectly linear.

What was linear, for me, was the downward trend last year.

I reached my personal goal on May 23, then trended gently downward into the summertime, when my body settled into its new base weight. I moved comfortably in a three-pound range for several months, and then I had sinus surgery, which inadvertently made me lose more weight, and in late November I found myself a full 10 pounds below my goal. I’d never been underweight in my life! I took a couple of days in a food rumspringa—pizza, a Slurpee, Thanksgiving dinner—before returning to heart-healthy eating, and normalized at the same level.

I hit 20 years of the line diet with a year-plus of improved health and nine months of steady-state in my new weight class. And the spreadsheet marches on, all 15 tabs of it, alongside my much newer daily food tracker.