paige_pharma said:

Weight is a noisy signal — daily variation of one to two kilograms from glycogen, sodium and gut contents — so a fortnight of flat readings is well…

Genuinely useful, thank you. I had the facts and not the framework.

Adding the clinical framing, because it changes how the question reads. Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then measure again under the same conditions.

TinaHashiRN said:

Start from the measurement rather than the conclusion.

Pushing back on TinaHashiRN here. Not convinced. The evidence being cited is consistent with the conclusion and also consistent with two other conclusions nobody has ruled out.

One concrete data point for the thread. Give anything pharmacological four weeks before you judge it, and give anything measured weekly a four-point rolling average before you call it a trend.

Moderator note: leaving this open. It is being argued well and the disagreement is the useful part. No action needed from anybody.