The Trigger Rule

Regain is never a decision; it is a drift the scale stops noticing at 2 kg and starts dictating at 10. The trigger rule is the simplest maintenance device on this site: one fixed line, one scripted response, and the discipline to run both without negotiating. This page explains where the line comes from, why it sits at 2 kg (about 5 lb) above goal rather than anywhere else, and exactly what to do the week it fires — because a rule you have to design at the moment of alarm is not a rule.

Why Relapse Is a Drift, Not a Decision

Nobody regains ten kilos on purpose. Regain is a sequence of quiet defaults: a travel week, a busier month, a dessert that returned, a weigh-in that quietly stopped happening. The problem with drift is not that it is inevitable — it is that it is invisible in time. The first two kilos are indistinguishable from water and from a normal Tuesday; by the time the change is obvious to the eye or the belt, the correction has become a whole new diet. The statistics page in this series shows what that path costs on average; the trigger rule is the instrument that makes the drift visible while it is still cheap to fix. It works because it separates the two jobs the scale used to do — telling you news and telling you what to do — and keeps only the second.

Setting the Line at 2 kg / 5 lb

The threshold needs to clear the noise and stay within the range of easy correction, and 2 kg (5 lb) does both jobs. Day-to-day and even week-to-week weight swings of a kilo or more are ordinary — water, glycogen, and salt move the number around — so the line cannot sit so low that ordinary fluctuation triggers it. It must also sit low enough that the correction is a matter of weeks, not months: 2 kg above goal, on the weekly average, is an honest surplus you can remove in two to four weeks of disciplined eating. Push the line to 5 kg or 10 kg and the same drift stops being a tune-up and becomes the new dieting project the whole series is trying to prevent. The bands of a normal day, the trend window, and this line are one coherent instrument.

The Cost of Waiting, Measured in Effort

Read the chart as a compounding argument. The weight difference between the top bar and the bottom is five-fold; the effort difference is not linear — it is the difference between a tune-up you can schedule around work and a project that reorganizes your quarter. The trigger rule exists to keep you in the bottom bar forever.

The Scripted Response, Step by Step

When the weekly average crosses the line, the response is already written. Nothing on this page requires judgment at 9 p.m.; it requires only that you run the script.

1. 📊 Confirm on the weekly average. One reading over the line is a Tuesday. Two consecutive weekly averages at or above goal + 2 kg is the alarm — no single-day readings allowed to trigger it.
2. 📉 Run a mini-cut, not a panic. Return to the deficit protocol for two to four weeks — a modest, planned calorie trim, not a crash and not a punishment. The deficit-measured series is the playbook.
3. 🥚 Keep the anchors switched on. Protein stays at 1.6 g/kg, both weekly lifts stay, steps stay. The correction trims energy; it does not dismantle the structure.
4. ⚖️ Watch the average return. Stay in the mini-cut until the weekly average is back at or below goal, then step back up to the band over a week or two.
5. 📝 Write one line on the cause. A trip, a month of steady stress, a returning dessert. Not for blame — for pattern. If the same cause appears twice, it stops being an accident and becomes a design problem for the identity page to solve.

Two weeks to four weeks is the honest window for 2 kg. If it ever takes longer, the likely story is that the drift was bigger than the weekly average showed, or the trim was too gentle — the band page covers how to read that.

What the Rule Is Not

• 🚫 Not a daily alarm. The line lives on the weekly average — the sole number with permission to fire it. A rule that screams at every kilo of water would be a source of anxiety, not a source of safety.
• 🚫 Not a punishment. The mini-cut is calibrated, short, and ends. It is a course correction, and its tone should match — mechanical, not moral.
• 🏥 Not for everyone, unadjusted. For people with a history of eating disorders, or for whom any scale contact is destabilizing, the rule must be redesigned with a clinician — often as a waist or clothing check and a gentler trigger. That is a specialist conversation, and this page is not prescribing around it.
• 🔁 Not an alternative to the band. The rule catches jumps; the weekly glance of the band measurement catches the slow pour that never trips a line. Maintenance runs on both.

The Trigger Rule, in One Table

Questions, Answered Briefly

• 😅 Won't 2 kg be triggered by water or a heavy weekend? Not if you hold the line to the weekly average and require two consecutive weeks. Ordinary fluctuation and a genuine surplus look entirely different on that reading.
• ✈️ What about vacations? Weigh twice on return, resume the weekly average, and let it settle a week before judging. If the average genuinely holds 2 kg over, run the script — you've earned the mini-cut with a good trip.
• 🐢 What if the slow creep never reaches +2 kg? That is the slow pour, and the line isn't designed for it — the four-week trend from the band page is. Find the returning drink or dessert and trim 100–200 kcal; the next page of this series, maintenance as identity, is where the slow pour actually gets fixed.
• 🧘 Does weighing risk making things worse? For most people, consistent self-weighing associates with better maintenance. For a minority it feeds obsession — and for that minority the rule must be rebuilt with a professional, because no maintenance device earns an eating disorder. That boundary is drawn in detail here.

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