How often do you do a weigh in?

Once a week. Pick a day and when you wake up weigh yourself. If you weigh yourself too many times, you're just going to be disappointed with yourself considering the body fluctuates a lot.

I do it every Monday, first thing. Wake up, take a leak, straight onto the scales. As has been said, do it too often and your natural fluctuation will cause weird results. Also, try not to eat anything (or at least, nothing heavy) just before bed the night before since the body will then struggle to metabolise the day's food and exercise and will leave you quite a bit heavier when you weigh in.

Good luck

Daily, first thing after going to the loo. I'm interested in seeing my daily fluctuations and I'd rather see them daily than not know if I've lost until the following week.

Once a week. Same time each week. I usually weigh in Saturday mornings right before I jump in the shower. Other than that, I'm not on the scale AT ALL. Too much up and down each day really messes with your head.

Once a month...

I do 2 - 3 per week, but only log Friday mornings. I weigh after my fast day.

My mid week weighs I typically do middle of the day, fully clothed. I'm familiar with my own fluctuations, so it just lets me know if I'm staying on track. My weekly logged weigh in I do after my morning walk but before eating anything.

Im not sure how often I should be doing weigh ins?

It's entirely up to you and your goals and your fortitude.

I weigh in twice a day - mornings 'for the record' and evenings to make sure something whacky didn't happen during the day.

Every single morning! Weekly would drive me nuts. After getting off the scales I feel much more motivated.

Shirley in Oregon..... GO DUCKS

I do it once every 2-4 weeks. If I don't feel emotionally capable of accepting my weight on any given day then I won't weigh myself. When I feel better I weigh myself.

Every morning. I write it down along with notes like whether it is a fast day or a gym or running day. I like lists and analysing so it suits me. I'm also sensible to know that my body has fluctuations so I don't go into a tailspin if my weight increases temporarily. My "official" weigh-in day is every Monday and that's when I note how much I have lost since the last week.

I think your weigh in value, whether daily or weekly, is too noisy to be looked at on its own. On a chart with a moving average you can really see what's going on. Look at my last 4 weeks, and imagine I weighed in only on Sunday:



Boy I'd be depressed! My weights would be: 211.3, 211.2, 207.1 207.9 (!! gain) ... it'd look to me like in the last 4 weeks, I'd barely managed to lose three pounds, and it sure wouldn't feel like steady progress. Now look at the chart above - the same 4 weeks - the trend line looks pretty straight, you can see how the weekends cause me difficulty but don't derail me, and I get positive feedback that I'm making progress pulling my trend down every single day.

And that is what motivates me not to grab the free chips, chocolates, dried sugared fruit, or cheesecake that's at the office every day...

Osric

[edit: the chart above is from trendweight.com, totally free not even any ads. I also like Libra on Android.]

I think your weigh in value, whether daily or weekly, is too noisy to be looked at on its own.

On the flip side, using too long an average can hide problems for longer than they should be hidden. In that graph, if the MA is over a 2 week period, that trend line is about to flatten significantly, because there hasn't been any lose over the past two weeks.

Not saying that there's necessarily a problem, just noting that every form of sampling and analysis has its blind spot.

For myself, I use a 7-day average for body measurements and 14-day sliding window to back-calculate TDEE components.

I think your weigh in value, whether daily or weekly, is too noisy to be looked at on its own.

On the flip side, using too long an average can hide problems for longer than they should be hidden. In that graph, if the MA is over a 2 week period, that trend line is about to flatten significantly, because there hasn't been any lose over the past two weeks.

trendweight.com does have the issue that you can't control how it calculates. It uses 10 day moving averages. I think this is probably a good value for most people, enables you to see progress in spite of stumbles, and any day with the diamond near the line is a warning day.

Libra is fully configurable but I am not sure how many people can really choose the values well.

Overall I like 10 days as a number that'll work for most people, and enable them to focus on the reality of how they're doing rather than water weight. Given water weight fluctuations are so extreme as to render total weight measures almost worthless, some sort of smoothing is needed to see the signal.

In my specific case, if we imagine that I'm doing something that has made 205 or so my new 'maintenance level', I will see it in just under 3 weeks as the trend line starts to snake between my diamonds. I think that's plenty fast feedback on when to cut more calories or get more exercise, especially since setting it much tighter would probably cause me needless panic.

[I do, however, have Libra set to 7 days at the moment, so I have a more alarmist graph as well as this one.]

Osric

P.S. If anyone cares, the full story can only be seen with the fat mass measures as well:



but this (fat mass) chart won't update so it'll get increasingly out of sync with the updating weight chart above.

Every morning as soon as I get up, have a pee and jump on the scales. I like to know the weight even if it goes up a little then I can take control. Especially good after my fast day because I can see if I'm maintaining ok - the fast tends to smooth out the daily fluctuations.

My weigh in day for myself is Sunday mornings.