How often should you weigh yourself?

mkolivier22
mkolivier22 Posts: 1 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
After weighing should you update in settings each time

Answers

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 35,148 Member
    edited February 2024
    Hello, and welcome!

    There's no one correct answer.

    I like to weigh daily under consistent conditions, first thing in the AM, after bathroom before eating/drinking, in the same state of (un-)dress every time. Then I put the result in a weight trending app. I care about the trend, not the individual daily weights.

    (Weight trending apps use statistics to guess what our weight is "really" doing, somewhat filtering out the noise from normal day to day multi-pound changes from fluctuating water retention and digestive contents that will eventually become waste. Examples are Libra for Android, Happy Scale for Apple/iOS, Trendweight with a free Fitbit account (don't need a device), Weightgrapher on the web, and others.)

    Some people feel stressed by daily weigh-ins. They may rationally choose to weigh weekly, monthly or never (in the later case using tape measurements, fit of particular clothing items, progress photos, or the like to assess progress).

    I look at daily weights as data points that are individually meaningless, just a snapshot of my body's momentary relationship with gravity. They're not in any way a measure of my worth as a human being, so I don't feel stress or anxiety about them. By weighing daily, I learned a lot about the reasons my particular body fluctuates in scale weight, which is reassuring to understand in the long run.

    No one should expect a steady drop on the scale: More realistic is ups and downs, with this week's range of ups and downs compared with those in a few weeks giving me an idea of whether I'm losing fat, holding steady, or gaining.

    As far as when to record in MFP, that's also a personal choice. Since I use the weight trending app as my "official record", while losing I only put a weight into MFP when I hit a new low. Now, in maintenance, I don't update it at all.

    If you do put updated weights in MFP, make sure you put them in as new weight updates, not typing them in where your starting weight goes.

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