To weigh daily or not to weigh daily

mizzie1980

I weigh every day, often multiple times a day. It's more curiosity than anything. If I'm away from home and can't weigh, it doesn't bother me at all. The little fluctuations don't bother me either, in fact, they help me. "Hmm, 1.5 pounds up from yesterday? *sigh* Well, I did eat that (insert salty food here), better hit the water hard today!" Or "0.6 down from yesterday! WooHoo! Keep it up, girl!"

But, I don't log my weight until Friday. On Friday, up or down, I log my lowest weight. I feel I need to be brutally honest with myself if I'm going to do this and for that I need to log the gains as well as the losses. I need to do that so I can take a look at my week and see why I gained. It's just what works for me.

It is frustrating to weigh on Tuesday, be XXX.X pounds, then officially weigh on Friday and be XXX.X + 0.6 pounds, but it is what it is. I'm trending down, and that's the important part.

yogsvr4

I also weight myself everyday. It does keep me motivated and fucused. It didn't take long to ignore the day to day fluctuations, but putting the numbes in graphic form makes a nice downhill slope.

pagoubupa

I weight daily. I record if I show a loss. I don't record gains. I record the same time, under the same conditions. It's a habit. I lived in a world of bad habits before, why not add a good one to live by now?

That said, I don't freak out if there's a gain.. and I don't lose my mind if I can't weigh.

I do this, too.

SkullMama73

I weigh myself every Friday morning. I like to splurge a bit on the weekend and I can burn it off by the next Friday. I found this older post about why the scale numbers fluctuate, written by Renee Cloe, an ACE certified personal trainer. People who weight themselves every day are often let down thinking they have gained weight overnight. It's a good read.


"We’ve been told over an over again that daily weighing is unnecessary, yet many of us can’t resist peeking at that number every morning. If you just can’t bring yourself to toss the scale in the trash, you should definitely familiarize yourself with the factors that influence it’s readings. From water retention to glycogen storage and changes in lean body mass, daily weight fluctuations are normal. They are not indicators of your success or failure. Once you understand how these mechanisms work, you can free yourself from the daily battle with the bathroom scale.

Water makes up about 60% of total body mass. Normal fluctuations in the body’s water content can send scale-watchers into a tailspin if they don’t understand what’s happening. Two factors influencing water retention are water consumption and salt intake. Strange as it sounds, the less water you drink, the more of it your body retains. If you are even slightly dehydrated your body will hang onto it’s water supplies with a vengeance, possibly causing the number on the scale to inch upward. The solution is to drink plenty of water.

Excess salt (sodium) can also play a big role in water retention. A single teaspoon of salt contains over 2,000 mg of sodium. Generally, we should only eat between 1,000 and 3,000 mg of sodium a day, so it’s easy to go overboard. Sodium is a sneaky substance. You would expect it to be most highly concentrated in salty chips, nuts, and crackers. However, a food doesn’t have to taste salty to be loaded with sodium. A half cup of instant pudding actually contains nearly four times as much sodium as an ounce of salted nuts, 460 mg in the pudding versus 123 mg in the nuts. The more highly processed a food is, the more likely it is to have a high sodium content. That’s why, when it comes to eating, it’s wise to stick mainly to the basics: fruits, vegetables, lean meat, beans, and whole grains. Be sure to read the labels on canned foods, boxed mixes, and frozen dinners.

Women may also retain several pounds of water prior to menstruation. This is very common and the weight will likely disappear as quickly as it arrives. Pre-menstrual water-weight gain can be minimized by drinking plenty of water, maintaining an exercise program, and keeping high-sodium processed foods to a minimum.

Another factor that can influence the scale is glycogen. Think of glycogen as a fuel tank full of stored carbohydrate. Some glycogen is stored in the liver and some is stored the muscles themselves. This energy reserve weighs more than a pound and it’s packaged with 3-4 pounds of water when it’s stored. Your glycogen supply will shrink during the day if you fail to take in enough carbohydrates. As the glycogen supply shrinks you will experience a small imperceptible increase in appetite and your body will restore this fuel reserve along with it’s associated water. It’s normal to experience glycogen and water weight shifts of up to 2 pounds per day even with no changes in your calorie intake or activity level. These fluctuations have nothing to do with fat loss, although they can make for some unnecessarily dramatic weigh-ins if you’re prone to obsessing over the number on the scale.

Otherwise rational people also tend to forget about the actual weight of the food they eat. For this reason, it’s wise to weigh yourself first thing in the morning before you’ve had anything to eat or drink. Swallowing a bunch of food before you step on the scale is no different than putting a bunch of rocks in your pocket. The 5 pounds that you gain right after a huge dinner is not fat. It’s the actual weight of everything you’ve had to eat and drink. The added weight of the meal will be gone several hours later when you’ve finished digesting it.

Exercise physiologists tell us that in order to store one pound of fat, you need to eat 3,500 calories more than your body is able to burn. In other words, to actually store the above dinner as 5 pounds of fat, it would have to contain a whopping 17,500 calories. This is not likely, in fact it’s not humanly possible. So when the scale goes up 3 or 4 pounds overnight, rest easy, it’s likely to be water, glycogen, and the weight of your dinner. Keep in mind that the 3,500 calorie rule works in reverse also. In order to lose one pound of fat you need to burn 3,500 calories more than you take in. Generally, it’s only possible to lose 1-2 pounds of fat per week. When you follow a very low calorie diet that causes your weight to drop 10 pounds in 7 days, it’s physically impossible for all of that to be fat. What you’re really losing is water, glycogen, and muscle.

This brings us to the scale’s sneakiest attribute. It doesn’t just weigh fat. It weighs muscle, bone, water, internal organs and all. When you lose "weight," that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve lost fat. In fact, the scale has no way of telling you what you’ve lost (or gained). Losing muscle is nothing to celebrate. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue. The more muscle you have the more calories your body burns, even when you’re just sitting around. That’s one reason why a fit, active person is able to eat considerably more food than the dieter who is unwittingly destroying muscle tissue.

Robin Landis, author of "Body Fueling," compares fat and muscles to feathers and gold. One pound of fat is like a big fluffy, lumpy bunch of feathers, and one pound of muscle is small and valuable like a piece of gold. Obviously, you want to lose the dumpy, bulky feathers and keep the sleek beautiful gold. The problem with the scale is that it doesn’t differentiate between the two. It can’t tell you how much of your total body weight is lean tissue and how much is fat. There are several other measuring techniques that can accomplish this, although they vary in convenience, accuracy, and cost. Skin-fold calipers pinch and measure fat folds at various locations on the body, hydrostatic (or underwater) weighing involves exhaling all of the air from your lungs before being lowered into a tank of water, and bioelectrical impedance measures the degree to which your body fat impedes a mild electrical current.

If the thought of being pinched, dunked, or gently zapped just doesn’t appeal to you, don’t worry. The best measurement tool of all turns out to be your very own eyes. How do you look? How do you feel? How do your clothes fit? Are your rings looser? Do your muscles feel firmer? These are the true measurements of success. If you are exercising and eating right, don’t be discouraged by a small gain on the scale. Fluctuations are perfectly normal. Expect them to happen and take them in stride. It’s a matter of mind over scale."

fit_librarian

I'm not weighing daily anymore. I just got so frustrated. So I'm weighing monthly instead.

skcardiog

Weigh daily - keeps me in check . . .

eidc

weekly

lizziebeth1028

Too many fluctuations from hour to hour, day to day, it would make me crazy!! I now weigh in once a month.

mamakira

I used to weigh daily, it was frustrating. My weight went up and down like a rollercoaster.
Now I weigh sometimes when I feel bloated or when I fear I have lost it the day before but official weigh-in is once a month. It works better for me.

Yaya1976

I weigh in every Saturday morning. I used to do it every Monday morning, but that didn't work for me, especially if I didn't have a good weekend

eyeshuh

I also weight myself everyday. It does keep me motivated and fucused. It didn't take long to ignore the day to day fluctuations, but putting the numbes in graphic form makes a nice downhill slope.

Same! The daily flux use to drive me crazy until I started graphing my loss. It's kind of neat to see how much you go up and down over the week, but then have that line also slowly sloping downwards. Plus I can thumb through my planner and look at the Monday to Monday or month to month difference over time. It's very motvating to me!

That said, I have moved more toward measurements and progress pictures now that I am closing in on my goal weight and now trying to tone up more than slim down.

icimani

I weigh myself 2x daily - morning and night. It keeps me motivated, keeps me from eating heavy things in the evening, and reminds me that there will be normal fluctuations. It also just serves to keep me mindful - it reminds me to pay attention. But I'm not obsessed with it - I don't weigh on vacations, nor do I get back up if I've forgotten and went to bed before weighing.

bugaha1

You can benefit from weighing every day because you’ll learn to understand why you always weigh more on this day and less on that day. I always weigh the least on Friday mornings every week, go figure. Oops! Except for Friday after Turkey day I was ---^

stines72

i used to have a pretty unhealthy mentality about weighing daily, but now i use it as more of a tool
i still weigh every day. i like to see trends with losing and gaining in relation to what ive eaten.. plus im trying to gain a little weight now so im watching the scale pretty closely while upping calories

rosieg1979

I weigh daily with wifi scales - they spit the data into a site called Trendweight which does some sort of maths, and plots a trend line, evening out any fluctuations. This satisfies my OCD desire for daily weighing and data, without me stressing about the ups and downs.

cwolfman13

When I first started on this lifestyle change I was weighing in daily, but quickly grew tired of the .1 - .5 fluxuations...it didn't really concern me, but I found it to be rather useless information. Now I do weekly...every Monday morning first thing before my shower. I've only done one measurement so far...figure I'll do one every time a pair of pants starts to feel a bit too roomy in the waist. As I proceed towards my goal, I imagine I will be putting additional emphasis on measurements and less on the actual weight on the scale as I introduce more aggresive strength training and start building more muscle.

waldo56

I treat myself like a problem to be engineered, and as such I need as much data as possible. I weigh myself daily and log it.

Being that I've lost, gained, and maintained, I'm pretty detached from the meaning of the number and don't let it affect me at all. It is just data.

Either way, it tends to say what I expect it to say anyway.

As a sidenote, weighing yourself daily is a habit that a high % of people that are successful in maintaining a significant amount of weight loss have. Once you get past the initial stages of dieting, your focus should almost solely be on how you are going to maintain your loss once you reach your goal, since maintaining your loss successfully is 10X harder than losing it in the first place, and there is very little advice out there on how to do it.

KrazyAsianNic

I think it is good to weigh once a week. This way you can update yourself enough to know what you need to change or how well you're doing.

As for myself, I haven't weighed since Oct 14. When 2013 begins, I want to weigh in the first of every month. I'm hoping by the New Year I can sort out everything that adds stress right now, so that I can focus more in one my weight loss in the New Year. I have decided once a month because I know I'm taking this slow so I can do it right this time. I also want to FEEL the difference, not just see the number change. I want to notice the little things.

Some people who may weigh themselves every day may become overly obsessed with the scale, and they will just beat themselves up and not realize the NSVs they may have.

themaskedpixie

i weigh weekly. for me every day would be nut's and 1 a month i'd loose motivation

briannadunn

I weigh every day to every week to every month. I weighed once a month last month and only lost 3.5 pounds total. This month I am weighing every day or every other day and writing it down on a Phone App called Libra..I put my weight and it tracks my trends so if I am feeling discouraged it shows that I am ahead of my goal or behind my goal and I adjust as I go along. I have done this for 2 weeks now. The scale doesn't control me anymore now that I see a trend. I went from my goal date going from May 16th to April 16th because of this.