Stop weighing yourself everyday challenge

I like weighing daily when I can. I'm a data geek and can now explain my fluctuations, usually sodium and water retention based. I'm not obsessive, so I won't be taking the challenge, sorry.

Just to come at it from a slightly different direction...

How about people just understand what the number on the scale is actually reflecting, and how that number relates (or in most cases, doesn't relate) to weight loss, progress, etc?

i agree!!

Although I do obsessively weigh myself on my home scale almost daily I also know that it only measures my total body weight. I go once a month to step on a scale that tells me my muscle mass, my fat mass and water weight (and much more!) and all the percentages. My first month, my scale read that i lost 7 lbs but when I got the detailed list, i actually lost 15 lbs of fat and gained 7 lbs of muscle!!!! i had gone down a BMI number and 5% of my body fat!!! But with my ordinary scale at home, I only lost 7 lbs....

So with that being said, i think i need to weigh only once a week because YES seeing the fluctuation does indeed get me discourage (as it did this AM when i was 2lbs heavier, who knows could be muscle or water gain!).

You're not gaining muscle that quickly. It's all (or at least 95%) water weight.

Actually No, its not water weight, the scale told me how much water weight as well. How would you know how much muscle mass my body was able to convert/build when you know nothing about my exercise routine? For all you know i could be lifting heavy 5 days a week and doing cardio ontop of that. So, you might feel you're right, but you're not so i respectfully disagree! thanks. )

Doesn't matter what you're doing... unless you're on steroids, you're not gaining muscle that quickly. It just doesn't happen that way. Scales are notoriously inaccurate... which is the point of this whole thread anyways, right?

I know this your fancy bed bath and beyond scale is not capable of telling you how much water weight you gained or loss at a reliable error free level. If you want something to do that try the BodPod. $30,000

Just to come at it from a slightly different direction...

How about people just understand what the number on the scale is actually reflecting, and how that number relates (or in most cases, doesn't relate) to weight loss, progress, etc?

i agree!!

Although I do obsessively weigh myself on my home scale almost daily I also know that it only measures my total body weight. I go once a month to step on a scale that tells me my muscle mass, my fat mass and water weight (and much more!) and all the percentages. My first month, my scale read that i lost 7 lbs but when I got the detailed list, i actually lost 15 lbs of fat and gained 7 lbs of muscle!!!! i had gone down a BMI number and 5% of my body fat!!! But with my ordinary scale at home, I only lost 7 lbs....

So with that being said, i think i need to weigh only once a week because YES seeing the fluctuation does indeed get me discourage (as it did this AM when i was 2lbs heavier, who knows could be muscle or water gain!).

You're not gaining muscle that quickly. It's all (or at least 95%) water weight.

Actually No, its not water weight, the scale told me how much water weight as well. How would you know how much muscle mass my body was able to convert/build when you know nothing about my exercise routine? For all you know i could be lifting heavy 5 days a week and doing cardio ontop of that. So, you might feel you're right, but you're not so i respectfully disagree! thanks. )

Doesn't matter what you're doing... unless you're on steroids, you're not gaining muscle that quickly. It just doesn't happen that way. Scales are notoriously inaccurate... which is the point of this whole thread anyways, right?

I know this your fancy bed bath and beyond scale is not capable of telling you how much water weight you gained or loss at a reliable error free level. If you want something to do that try the BodPod. $30,000

Its not a bed bath and beyond scale, it is a scale used by a professional dietician that probably paid $30,000 for it!

You're right, you know everything... how silly to think anyone else might know something. Whatever you do, don't listen to ANY advice EVER on the forums.


oh, wait... you've already got that part down. nice job.

Hi! I know this is an old post but I want to join if the challenge is still open. I am trying to get over an eating disorder and I can't seem to get over the obsessive weighing. I weigh myself like 40 times a day Weighing myself like this works for me because it helps me control how much I eat and pushes me to exercise more. It's just that I don't love anything about myself and I think it will never happen unless I learn to love my reflection rather than my number.

OK. I'm a scientist and I weigh myself every day and record my weight as precisely as I can.

I weigh every day because I know my weight easily varies by plus or minus a pound, depending on all sorts of things. A large glass of water weighs about 10 oz, or 300 g, for example. Even just sitting around, you are burning the food you have eaten and you are losing water as you breathe. I try to eliminate some of the variability by weighing myself every morning after a cup of coffee, but before eating - and of course with no clothes!

The problem with weighing yourself just once a week is that one week you might hit a low fluctuation and the next week a high fluctuation. You then think you have not lost any weight, or worse, put some on, and be depressed. Conversely, you could get a high reading and then a low one and think you are losing weight fabulously, when you are not. You still get these pesky fluctuations whether you weigh yourself daily or weekly!

So it is much better to get a good feel for how much your weight varies naturally by taking a lot of measurements. If you record them all on this site, you can look at the report charts and it is easy to see whether inside the fluctuations your weight is trending up or down, and how rapidly. (The 7 day report is not very useful really. Look at a longer-term one. I am a bit obsessive and I use an Excel spreadsheet so I can play with the data and make nice charts.) Worry about the trend and ignore the superimposed fluctuations.

I have been using this site for three years now and I have a beautiful chart of my long term progress. At first, I weighed 199 pounds and I got my weight coming down at about 1 pound a week. After about six months I had lost about 30 pounds. As I was getting closer to my target of 155 pounds, I adjusted my goals so I was losing half a pound a week. You can clearly see the bend in the chart at this point! After about 18 months I hit my goal and went into maintenance mode.

I found that maintaining my weight at my goal level was not so easy. I have had a couple of periods when the trend has been upwards and I had to work to bring it down again. At Christmas and on vacations I forget the diet and indulge a little, knowing that I can always get back to my target weight again. This last Christmas I put on 3 pounds, but I have lost almost all of it now.

So the bottom line is: YES, GO AHEAD AND WEIGH YOURSELF EVERY DAY, AND DON'T WORRY ABOUT DOING IT. You will understand the normal variation of your weight and you will not be deluded by it. Scientists know that the more data you have, the better! :happy:

In.

My waterweight gain ticked me off, worst part.. I KNOW it's waterweight, yet it still ticks me off.

So IN.

:drinker: :drinker: :drinker: :drinker:

Just my opinion, but if you are stable in your mean weight or are reducing slowly (one pound a week), then you can get more discouraged weighing once a week because the error (daily fluctuation) is larger than the change (one pound a week weight loss). So you could actually have lost a pound, but you hit your weigh-in on a +3 fluctuation so it looks like you gained two pounds. Of you stayed the same and it looked like you gained 3 or lost 2. It's noise.

The fluctuations are REAL. So is your weight loss. Not weighing may work for you - some people say it does. But for ME, if I've got error in my measurement, weighing more frequently gives me a better sense of my slow downward trend.

I think of it as 'bouncing' and my weight as having a 'zone' instead of a single real number. I celebrate every new low on the bounces and ignore the high bounces. If I'm hitting my goals, those are obviously error.

Just a word from your friendly neighborhood statistician.

I am totally addicted to weighing every day and now that I'm lifting the scale has crept up and up and it's driving me crazy.....I am going to do my best to do the "once a week" thing.....but I will weigh myself on Saturday mornings.....that gives me all week to stay on track with logging and exercise etc.....just in case the weekend turns into a little bit of a gong show now and then......I won't be discouraged that way and I will have time to correct the damage.....good luck everyone!!!!