Stop weighing yourself everyday challenge

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!!!!