When to weight yourself?

I weigh myself every morning-first thing right after I potty. It’s most important that you weigh under consistent circumstances (same scale, time of day, etc). Our weight fluctuates throughout the day and from day to day. Attempting to weigh under consistent circumstances helps to minimize how much fluctuations due to drinks & meals recently consumed, etc shows up on our record.

This is an old pic-but this is exactly why I weigh every day. You’ll notice there is a clear downward trend, but the weights one month apart are exactly the same. If I only weighed monthly and I saw the same number, I would be discouraged because there was no change, and I’d also probably make changes to a plan that was actually working.

I weigh myself every morning (unless traveling away from home), wearing only watch & glasses, after using the bathroom, before eating or drinking. I've done that for probably a decade now, starting long before I was even trying to lose weight.

Doing this helps me understand what makes my weight fluctuate from day to day. For me, it's not at all an emotional thing: Usually, I know what to expect.

These days, I record my daily weight in a weight trending app (I use Libra for Android, but there's also Happy Scale for iOS, Trendweight with a Fitbit account, Weightgrapher . . . .). Before there were apps, I noted my daily weight on graph paper with a dot where the date on the X-axis met the scale number on the Y-axis. I have years of this data.

Obsessed? No. Data geek.

Consider thinking of it this way:

We don't have a single "true current weight". Over a day or a few, we have a current weight range. What we see on the scale will move up and down through a range of a few pounds, because of the fluctuations in water retention and digestive contents that are a normal part of a healthy body's way of staying healthy.

Over weeks to months, we have a long-term weight trend. The trend moves up (bumpily) when consistently gaining fat, down (still bumpily) when consistently losing fat, or stays level/horizontal (still bumpily) when maintaining. On a graph, the daily weights make jagged bumpy progress downhill, uphill, or level, as time goes on.

When a person is losing fat reasonably steadily, their daily range might be 198-203 this week, 197-204 next week, 195-202 the following week, 193-199 the next week, 195-202 again the next, then back down to 191-194, and so on: Up and down day by day, down overall by weeks and months, not down every week, but down overall.