I Gained 1kg Overnight

Why your calendar can’t explain your life (and what can)

Leonardo.ai prompt: When something surprises you, don’t just ask “why.” Ask: what, exactly, would have helped me reach the right conclusion faster? Then go build that.

This morning, as I was wrapping up my monthly review, I looked over my weight chart and noticed something odd: I had gained weight in January. That’s nothing out of the ordinary, unfortunately. But what surprised me was the shape of it. Almost all the new weight appeared overnight, about ten days ago. Weight fluctuates, sure. What bothered me was the geometry: one clean 1kg step up, then a flat line until today.

My first impulse was to check my calendar for anything telling… A big outing. A party. A trip.

Nope.

Then I opened my daily notes in Obsidian. Maybe I had written down something that would make the spike make sense.

Also nothing.

So I tried a different approach. I brainstormed more openly: What changed recently? Not what happened on the calendar, but what I had quietly changed without writing it down anywhere.

This was trickier than expected. It took me thirty minutes to reconstruct a ten-second fact. I dug through notes, emails, and a few scattered memories until it finally clicked: Ten days ago was when I started a new creatine supplement. Creatine can often increase water retention initially.¹ I even knew that beforehand and thought this might happen. Which makes the whole thing slightly absurd: I forgot something I explicitly anticipated, and then “solved” it by remembering it.

Ouch.

So, I could have swallowed that and stopped there. But I didn’t. Because the annoying part wasn’t the creatine or the weight gain. It was that it took me thirty minutes to recall something that should have taken ten seconds.

So I asked myself a better question:

What, exactly, would have helped me reach the right conclusion faster?

The answer was obvious the moment I asked it: a change log. A small record of what changed, and when.

So I created a new note in my personal knowledge companion and started listing recent changes and notable events in my life as they came back to me:

[[2026-01-31]]: ✅ Completed a 2h snow rucking session (”Schneewalzer”) with fam 🥾
[[2026-01-30]]: 🥙 Had big pizza with my family 🍕
[[2026-01-28]]: 🔋 Completed a 40min workout in Fitomat gym 🏋️‍♂️ 
[[2026-01-24]]: ▶️ Started going to bed earlier 🛌
[[2026-01-22]]: ▶️ Started taking Refresh 2.0 Creatine supplements 🍹
[[2026-01-16]]: 🔋 Completed a 20min workout at home 💃
[[2026-01-16]]: 🟠 Celebrated 36th birthday with family and friends 🎊
[[2026-01-14]]: ⚫️ Had Ubermind Mastermind Call 📲

This is exactly what I would have needed this morning!

If I’d already had this list when the weight question came up, the whole investigation would have taken seconds instead of thirty minutes. I would have opened it, scanned the last two weeks, and seen it immediately: the bump lined up perfectly with when I started creatine.

A calendar and daily notes are great tools for personal archaeology. But many of the things that move our body and mind aren’t captured in meetings or in the flow of daily journaling. They’re the tiny changes that seem harmless: starting a supplement, dropping a food habit, shifting sleep timing, adopting a new app or habit. But weeks later, they may explain a lot.

Personal growth often fails for boring reasons. We change too many things at once. We change things too often. Or we simply forget what we changed, and later we can’t connect cause and effect. A personal change log, at least as I built it this morning, seems like a useful way to push back against that. Going forward, I’m going to establish it as one of my focal omnipresent contexts (FOCs). Try it if you want.

But I’ll be honest: it’s brand new. I don’t know how long I’ll keep it, or whether it will still be useful in months. That’s why the main point of this post wasn’t the change log itself. It was the idea that led me to create it in the first place.

When something surprises you, don’t just ask “why.” Ask: what, exactly, would have helped me reach the right conclusion faster? Then go build that.

I’ve been doing versions of this instinctively, but I’d never made the inside-out approach explicit in my own life. Now that I have it, it feels like a no-brainer for making better decisions with less self-blame.

If you try it, I’d genuinely love to hear what it reveals. 👇

1. Early body-mass increases are often attributed to short-term fluid retention (body water), on the order of 0.5–1.0 L in some reports, which can appear as a noticeable scale bump. See: Kreider, R. B., et al. (2017). International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: Safety and efficacy of creatine supplementation in exercise, sport, and medicine. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 14, 18.