Delayed reactions: caloric intake versus the scale

My hobby is dog training, and one of the most important principles of dog training is that the outcome you as a trainer provide for your dog as a consequence of the dog's action has little meaning if that outcome doesn't occur virtually instantly. Five seconds later is way too late; no way can a dog correlate an outcome with some behavior that occurred five seconds earlier, and therefore such a delayed outcome has no effect on the dog's future decision making. But reward a dog within a split second a few times, and you have a learned behavior the dog will become more and more likely to repeat in the same context in the future.

Of course, the same principle applies to all species, including humans, though our ability to think abstractly gives us a bit more flexibility. For example, getting an occasional ticket in the mail for going thru a photo-enforced speed trap will eventually teach us to slow down, at least on that stretch of road. But many of us need half a dozen of those tickets before it sinks in, and we may still blow it occasionally.

However, if a ticket magically appeared on our dashboard the instant we passed the camera, we'd learn much faster, and the learning would be much more solid.

A similar issue applies to weight loss: the scale is an invaluable tool for losing weight, because it gives us an objective measure of our progress, assuming it isn't one of those scales that changes when you move around on it, and assuming we weight ourselves at the same time of day, with about the same hydration, and wearing the same weight of clothes each time.

But the problem is that any change in weight may not reflect the food intake of the previous 24 hours. Instead, at least for me, it seems to be offset by at least two days. That is, eating too many calories on Monday won't show up as weight gain till Wednesday or Thursday, and eating a moderated diet won't show up as weight loss for the same. It will show up eventually, but not the next morning. In fact, Tuesday morning may show the opposite loss or gain that Monday's calories would predict, not reflecting Monday's eating but actually the weekend's.

That's OK. You can compensate for the delay in your mind, and to some extent modify your behavior accordingly.

But wearing my behaviorist hat, I often think how much more useful it would be, from a behavioral point of view, if your weight instantly fluctuated to reflect your excesses and sacrifices.