Nice one bob, I hope you feel as fresh when you read this as you hoped!

Thanks!

I went to sleep quickly last night, had a full night's rest, and woke up as if I had not had any AL. Very refreshing. Of course, one lone drink for people like us may as well be nothing. But still, it was very relaxing having just the one drink and no more. Almost like a normal person would feel. I guess that's what our treatment is pushing us toward, normalcy.

Bob

Jealous.

Bob - hope your wife is doing well & appreciate the "cute" graphs. No can do, muchacho. We are talking rocket science in my world of barelyabletocut&paste...kudos on your progress!

:-))

Thanks Houtx. She's improving each day, but still cannot drive yet. Unfortunately, I have to return to work tomorrow, but her mom is coming over to help. So not so much stress as it could have been.

Anyway, here's another week's cute, yet controversial graph. I am beginning to dread these weekly graphs... There's always some uncomfortable discussion about them.

What I like about the graph is that it is starting to show an exponential decay, although the correlation coefficient (R²) of 0.45 is still considered "medium" by most measures. However, if I extrapolate into the future with any kind of diminished craving as I do now, the correlation to an exponential decay becomes stronger.

What is particularly interesting to me is the extinction formula which approximates to #drinks-in-a-week = 55 x exp^(-1/16week#). So next week, if I plug in week 21, I should be maxing out at about 15 drinks. Of course with the roller coaster I have been experiencing recently, it probably won't be near that. But it does give me a "not-to-exceed" goal for the week. It then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. But now that I have my drinking under control thanks to TSM, I can choose to follow my "natural" extinction curve. BTW, if I extrapolate way beyond what the data allows, on my 1 year TSM anniversary, I will be down to 2 drinks per week. Now that I can live with!

Any thoughts on using my extinction calculation as my maximum units for each week if it is easy for me to do?

Bob

Quote:So next week, if I plug in week 21, I should be maxing out at about 15 drinks.

Yeesh -- That's not what it means at all!!! It just means that if you drink, say 80 next week, the trend line will go up a wee bit. But not much, because it would be an outlier.

We humans seem to want to be in control of TSM as much as we want to be in control of the trend line.

Let go and enjoy the ride -- after all, even with some scatter, it's taking you where you want to go. As SR often said, it works whether you want it to or not.

Bob,

We really don't have enough data yet to do a proper regression analysis. At this point, we are just hitting the point in our data where things starting to level out. We probably really need a couple more months of data to see how many units per week we end up maintaining in the immediate future.

Your regression equation really doesn't predict anything useful at this point and neither does mine.

Congrats on another good week!

Q

Hi Bob

I tend to agree with ~Q~ - the amount of data is fairly limited so the extrapolation is risky (but very tempting in a human sense ). If you use daily data, you'll have more scatter but a lot more data, and therefore a less risky extrapolation.

One other thing to note is that the intercept (54.9 or whatever, in your graph) has a physical meaning - it is the rate at which you drank before this method - you should set it at a value you're comfortable with from your drinking prior to TSM.

I do like your idea about using the curve to set a target for yourself, although be careful about not setting up disappointments for yourself if you don't reach the target. Maybe have a couple of targets - like "I'm going to be under target this week, OR within 10% of this weeks target and on_target the next week" etc - that way a little slippage can be motivation to do better rather than a source of frustration

lena - Since I am "under control" now, why not set up goals or targets? Today, I decided I didn't want anything to drink. So I'm not. Tomorrow may be different. But if I have in mind a 15 drink limit for the week and I am easily able to do it, why can't I? And if I can do it, I think I can comfortably state to everyone I'm cured. Control, and not number of units, is one of the reasons I have not declared myself cured yet.

~Q~ - I agree that the regression analysis has too few data points to be an accurate predictor of even the short term future. However, the correlation coefficient may be within the strong range as soon as 2 weeks from now. If my correlation coefficient is even marginally strong, it should be a good indicator of a range of drinking units for the upcoming week. An example is that it would be highly unlikely that this week I will return to pre-TSM drinking levels. It falls way too far from the trend line. However, it is more likely that I may not drink at all this week. Most likely, it will fall somewhere in the low double digits or high single digits.

1-4-the-road - Good point on the intercept. My old signature line, before I ran into the 255 character limitation, showed my pre-TSM drinking units to be 50 to 60. So as I played with the data last night, as long as the curve intercept remained in that range, it was still true to life. So, I am satisfied with the 55. After thinking about the extinction curve today and reading your target comment, I decided to set a not-to-exceed target for each week based on the curve. Most likely, with the mindset I currently have, I will be successful. If I do exceed it, no problem because as lena and SR said, TSM works whether you want it to or not. That higher-than-the-curve data point will be just some "high scatter". I will be a bit disappointed, of course, but certainly not a failure. If I don't even get up the target for the week, it will bring down the curve slightly for the next week's target, whicj I consider a win for me.

To everyone: Now that I appear to be in control of when I drink and when I do not, I see no reason why I can't experiment with targets. I personally enjoy such things. Why take my fun away? I am not suggesting that anyone else do this, but this is a candid open anonymous forum and I thought I'd share what I wanted to do. Of course, I am still open for other thoughts and I truly appreciate the input I have received thus far, even dissenting viewpoints.

Bob

Bob,

We've all come to enjoy your controversial, yet informative, graphs.

What would be interesting is to see if we could get our hands on the regression equation from Dr. Sinclair's research, then compare this against what we are getting from our own personal data.

Q

At 12 units per week and total control, I say if you want to stand on your head on your lawn mower and drink Guiness, go for it.