Obsessed with weighing myself

keke7133

Ok, call me crazy, but I didn’t start my diet out knowing exactly what I weigh. I weighed myself a few week ago (Weeks prior to starting my diet) and I was 160.2. When I dieted previously I would become obsessed with weighing myself. I’d start out weighing weekly, then started weighing myself daily. Sometimes twice I day. This time around I didn’t even purchase a scale *yet* (it’s only been 5 days since starting my diet). Does anyone else obsess? Should I keep going without the scale and just go by how I feel and how my clothes fit?

harper16

Weighing yourself daily or twice a day doesn't seem like an obsession, for most people on here including myself that's normal. I like seeing the daily trends. If you are more comfortable going without a scale and relying on clothes, or other measurements there's nothing wrong with that. It's all about what works best for you.

Dogmom1978

General daily weight fluctuations are normal, so personally, I think weighing daily IS obsessive. I weigh and measure once a week. I’m tempted to weigh more obviously, but I know that won’t necessarily give me any more of an accurate picture of what my weight is really doing, so I only weigh on Saturday mornings pre breakfast. I measure on Wednesdays though, so at least I get some more info mid week.

renae_shea

oh i do it every day .But am going to start doing it weekly from now on..

lynn_glenmont

harper16 wrote: »

Weighing yourself daily or twice a day doesn't seem like an obsession, for most people on here including myself that's normal. I like seeing the daily trends. If you are more comfortable going without a scale and relying on clothes, or other measurements there's nothing wrong with that. It's all about what works best for you.

Obsession isn't really about how often you weigh yourself. It's about your mental and emotional relationship to weighing yourself. A "normal" behavior for one person can be obsessive for someone else.

Lietchi

lynn_glenmont wrote: »

harper16 wrote: »

Weighing yourself daily or twice a day doesn't seem like an obsession, for most people on here including myself that's normal. I like seeing the daily trends. If you are more comfortable going without a scale and relying on clothes, or other measurements there's nothing wrong with that. It's all about what works best for you.

Obsession isn't really about how often you weigh yourself. It's about your mental and emotional relationship to weighing yourself. A "normal" behavior for one person can be obsessive for someone else.

For example: I weigh myself daily to have data to evaluate my weight trend, especially useful since I'm only at a 275kcal deficit a day (weight loss easily hidden by weight fluctuations).
I don't think this is obsessive behavior for me.

The fact that I take my scale with me while traveling (even short trips) so I can still weigh myself daily is, in my own opinion, just a tad obsessive

amusedmonkey

I weigh daily, and I can say I'm a little bit obsessed, not with weight per se, but with dieting data in general. Love calories, love weight numbers, love activity numbers, low how they all compare and connect and interact. Love to jigsaw food items into my calorie budget. I just love numbers in general. It's not the bad kind of obsessed, more like fascination. If obsessing with the scale doesn't affect you negatively you can just accept it, we all have our quirks. If it leads to anxiety or takes you into an undesirable headspace, you can use other ways to estimate your progress, like clothes or pictures.

harper16

lynn_glenmont wrote: »

harper16 wrote: »

Weighing yourself daily or twice a day doesn't seem like an obsession, for most people on here including myself that's normal. I like seeing the daily trends. If you are more comfortable going without a scale and relying on clothes, or other measurements there's nothing wrong with that. It's all about what works best for you.

Obsession isn't really about how often you weigh yourself. It's about your mental and emotional relationship to weighing yourself. A "normal" behavior for one person can be obsessive for someone else.

I agree with this, and I should have done a better job of explaining myself. Thank you for the insight.

PAV8888

The same behaviour CAN be obsessive for one and not obsessive for the other.

Heck, I can personally engage in the same behaviour and it could have been obsessive yesterday and not obsessive today, or v.v.. So mental state and viewpoint has a lot to do with things!

slunburg wrote: »

General daily weight fluctuations are normal.... but I know that won’t necessarily give me any more of an accurate picture of what my weight is really doing

You mentioned in another thread that you're losing 1-2lbs a week and it feels like watching paint dry

Actually 1-2lbs a week is a very very fast rate of loss, especially if you're not currently morbidly obese.

When losing 1-2lbs a week, it is likely that a once weekly weigh in will provide a fairly relevant picture of what your weight trend is doing.

Why? because you're operating at a loss level of 4-10lbs a month. And for *most* people's normal weight fluctuations are probably in the sub 5lb range.

But what happens when you are operating at a loss rate of 1lb or .5lb a week, or like I did the year+ before entering maintenance, at less than 1lb a MONTH?

Are you not losing weight then?

I would argue that 11.1lbs lost in a year (and not regained during the past four) argues that it was a valid loss!

But how do you *see* a sub 150 Cal a day deficit if you only weigh yourself once a week, or once a month, or even less often, and on May 17 you weight in at 163 when back on March 14 you weighed 161?

Did you gain 2lbs during two months of careful attention to what you were eating, or did you lose the 1.7lbs your weight trend says you lost?

How would you know this if you didn't have the intervening points to plot the trend?

(arguably: maybe you don't NEED to know this--but, I, for sure, did feel that I needed to know I was progressing instead of regressing!)

candylilacs

If you're not losing a pound a day, it's going to seem discouraging. You pick a day off the week -- it's a weekly weigh-in, not a daily weigh-in.

keke7133

Thanks everyone. When I say obsessive, i was. I quit my last diet bc the anxiety was bad, and I stopped losing weight. After quitting that diet, I binged on everything I missed eating. Ended up gaining 20lbs. Looking back now, I should’ve just threw the scale out and kept on trucking. For my mental state, I’m better off just going without one for a bit. After posting this, I caved and used my neighbors scale. I went from 160.2 to 159.2 in 5 days. I’m not sure why I expected to see a lower number than that, but I regret even stepping on that thing.

Lietchi

keke7133 wrote: »

Thanks everyone. When I say obsessive, i was. I quit my last diet bc the anxiety was bad, and I stopped losing weight. After quitting that diet, I binged on everything I missed eating. Ended up gaining 20lbs. Looking back now, I should’ve just threw the scale out and kept on trucking. For my mental state, I’m better off just going without one for a bit. After posting this, I caved and used my neighbors scale. I went from 160.2 to 159.2 in 5 days. I’m not sure why I expected to see a lower number than that, but I regret even stepping on that thing.

Nothing to do with weighing yourself, but this is a bit of a red flag to me.
You can eat anything you like while losing weight, as long as it fits your calories. Feeling deprived of foods you like is not a sustainable way of losing weight.
I have been losing weight for a whole year now and I don't miss any foods. Because I haven't deprived myself of any foods I like. I just eat them in more appropriate quantities.

keke7133

Oh, I learned the hard way! Last time around I thought the thing to do was just cut all the bad out from day 1. I can’t do that this time. I still enjoy my regular coffee every night. And So far this time around I haven’t been overly tempted by anything put in front of me yet (I mean it’s only been 5 days lol) but when something i do really enjoy is there, I’m going to have some. I’m hoping this way I’ll be able to stick it out and actually make my goal weight for once (and maintain it) this time. Thanks for your response and Congrats on Hitting your year mark!

dawnkirkwood18

I actually started out by weighing myself several times a day- not for any other reason than to learn. I read the wonderful posts on here about how much weight can fluctuate in a day, etc. based upon what you eat, your monthly cycle, your exercise regime, etc. it was very eye opening for me and I actually no longer feel trapped or ruled by the scale mentally- I weigh every morning now and I have a general understanding of how my body responds to certain foods, etc. it has helped ME obsess less about the number and concentrate more on the actions I am taking for their own sake- healthy eating and exercise.

HeidiCooksSupper

There's no reason to weigh yourself if you can use other "metrics" to assess your progress like measurements or the way your clothes fit. Weighing more than once a day doesn't really tell you much since our weights vary throughout the day naturally. Indeed, for younger women who are cycling, weight changes a good deal naturally over the course of a month due to hormonal changes. I weigh once a day to keep remind myself each morning what I'm doing but otherwise, I've taught myself to ignore the scale during the day. Lots of folks only weigh themselves once a week or once a month. It's your choice about how often you get on the scale but it is only an estimate of what you weigh at a particular day and time. Don't give it any more attention than it deserves and don't let it control your thinking.

gcminton

Do I obsess? Nah. I officially weigh myself most mornings, first thing, to eliminate as many variables as is reasonable and collect more data points for a trend line.

I also sometimes hop on at random points in the day, just to watch the fluctuations do their thing. It's fascinating to weigh in at a lower number later in the day than I had in the morning, but it's really nothing more than that. Just a number telling you a single thing about your body at that moment, and not a whole picture in the slightest.

If weighing frequently is causing you distress then I'd say it could be a good idea to stop, but otherwise it really is just down to personal preferences.

I will note that starting to weigh myself daily really did help me learn to not worry about it so much. It helped me get used to the idea of fluctuations and what they tend to look like for me, and internalize that an upward tick one day or in the same day doesn't mean anything in regards to my fat loss.

swimmchick87

I used to weigh myself multiple times per day and record my weight every single morning. On the one hand, it seemed to make more sense than weighing once per week. Due to regular fluctuations, sometimes my weight would be a pound or two higher for seemingly no reason, and then it would be gone the next day. If that was my one weigh in day for the week, I would have thought I worked so hard all week and didn't lose anything, and then might decide to give up. I also found that if I was "off track" I avoided the scale like the plague, so it felt like an accountability piece.

After doing the yo-yo thing numerous times, last summer I decided to try setting my weight loss goal on here to 1 pound per week. That gave me more calories per day and I had a much easier time sticking with it. However, when you think in terms of days or weeks, 1 pound per week seems really slow. I also had another issue- I was starting out far heavier than I've ever been. So even though by the end of the summer I'd lost about 10 pounds, as expected, I felt like it didn't matter because I was still "really fat." When some stressful things happened in the fall I fell off the wagon all together because I felt like it didn't matter that much- I'd worked hard all summer, but I was still huge.

So I started again on January 1 with the same plan, except for NOT weighing myself. I have been pretty consistent since January 1 and I haven't weighed myself once. It's actually been very freeing. I've focused on how much better I feel, both emotionally and physically, when eating right. I've seen changes in how I look and I've gone from a size 18/20 to a 14/16. I figure at some point, I will go back to weighing because it will be harder to lose when I'm smaller and I'll need to be much more exact. But at my current size, I'll still lose if I just stick to my plan.

This is the longest I've ever managed to stay totally on track before, so I'm feeling pretty good about it. I have a feeling if I were looking at a number on a scale, I'd feel less good about it because I'm definitely still overweight and the number isn't "good." I will say, one thing that made me confident in trying this is that this isn't even close to my first rodeo. I know how to track/log accurately, weigh things accurately, use my fitbit to get an accurate activity level, etc. I think for someone who is new to this, it's important to weigh in and track weight over time to make sure you're actually doing everything correctly.

Another thing to note is that it takes awhile to change sizes, so you have to be patient and that may not work for everyone as far as tracking results that way. I've also found that with clothes, I can obviously feel mine getting looser but I get trapped into waiting for something to happen like literally zipping up my pants and then having them fall down to my knees before thinking I need a new size. At least on my body, it just doesn't work like that. My clothes were super loose, but they "stayed up" (not very well when walking/moving around) so I felt like I hadn't changed sizes. Then I went to get some new things and discovered I was TWO sizes smaller!

I also seem to be in the minority in that I see changes pretty quickly when looking in the mirror. Before when I was weighing myself, I'd be happy that my face and arms would start to look slimmer almost right away, but then be disappointed because I hadn't really lost that many pounds yet. A lot of people here seem to be the opposite- even if they've actually lost tons of weight, they have a hard time seeing it and feel like they look the same. If you're one of those people, seeing the hard numbers may work better for you.

Hanibanani2020

I used to weigh myself minimum 10 times a day. Twice is pretty average I think

Hanibanani2020

To add I was obsessed back then

age_is_just_a_number

I weigh myself daily. I find it helps with motivation and keeping me on track.
What concerns me more than weighing yourself daily is the fact that you’ve referred to a ‘diet’.
This is a lifestyle change not a diet. It is not like you are going to get to a goal and then go back to your old ways of eating and expect to stay at your goal.
You need to commit to a new healthier you.

kshama2001

slunburg wrote: »

General daily weight fluctuations are normal, so personally, I think weighing daily IS obsessive. I weigh and measure once a week. I’m tempted to weigh more obviously, but I know that won’t necessarily give me any more of an accurate picture of what my weight is really doing, so I only weigh on Saturday mornings pre breakfast. I measure on Wednesdays though, so at least I get some more info mid week.

I use the Happy Scale app. Daily data points show trends much faster than weekly data points. The app has a trend line that smooths out the fluctuations. I don't care so much about the actual number, but whether I am in the green (losing) or not.

lynn_glenmont

harper16 wrote: »

lynn_glenmont wrote: »

harper16 wrote: »

Weighing yourself daily or twice a day doesn't seem like an obsession, for most people on here including myself that's normal. I like seeing the daily trends. If you are more comfortable going without a scale and relying on clothes, or other measurements there's nothing wrong with that. It's all about what works best for you.

Obsession isn't really about how often you weigh yourself. It's about your mental and emotional relationship to weighing yourself. A "normal" behavior for one person can be obsessive for someone else.

I agree with this, and I should have done a better job of explaining myself. Thank you for the insight.

Thanks for taking it in the spirit it was meant. On reflection, I might have done better quoting the OP rather than you, but there was something in the phrasing of your first sentence that sent my mind down this corridor, so in the moment it seemed natural to quote you.

lynn_glenmont

My approach: I weigh once a week in the morning, during the "naked time" between bathroom activities and getting dressed. Once in a while I forget that it's weigh-in day. If I remember when I've only pulled on one or two undergarments, I'll strip back down and weigh myself. If I don't remember until I'm fully dressed and headed out the door, I won't bother and will just weigh the next day. Personally, if I felt like I had to go back inside and strip to weigh myself just because it was weigh-in day, for me that would feel obsessive, even though I was only weighing once a week.

If I were weighing everyday because, for example, I wanted to gather more data and use a trending app, but I was fine with missing the occasional day because I forgot or I was really pressed for time, that wouldn't seem obsessive, even though I was weighing everyday instead of once a week.

I don't think weighing multiple times a day is necessarily obsessive, but it seems unnecessary and would likely be introducing a lot of noise into your data. If someone doesn't understand intra-day weight fluctuations, I think it could also introduce frustration.

keke7133

@swimmchick87 thank you so much! Everything you just said is exactly what I needed to hear. We are so similar in our weight loss journeys over the years. The fact you had the will power to quit your scale is inspiring. Again, thank you and congratulations on sticking to your healthy lifestyle.

keke7133

@tgillies003 you're right. Diet isn’t a word I should use. Especially since maintaining is what I’ve failed at twice in the past. Thank you for calling me out on that. 🤣😘

deputy_randolph

When I was actively losing weight, I weighed myself everyday under the same conditions (wake up, use bathroom, unclothed (inbetween pjs and real clothes), no breakfast) for reliability of my data.

I felt like daily weighing kept me accountable and on the right course. It was a slow process, but I learned not to freak out over time as long as the overall trend was downward over the weeks and months.

Once I lost the desired amount (months+), I cut back to once a week to check in on maintenance skills. Now, I weigh myself once a month max twice a month. At this point, my clothes will let me know if I need to reasses.

Having said this, I still log and weigh my food...which sounds obsessive, but logging and weighing is habitual now, and takes the stress out of eating for me, b/c I've pre-planned most meals.