How To Not Feel Bad Gaining 5 Pounds

Save yourself a lot of stress and only weigh in once per month. My body weight can fluctuate 10lbs one day to the next, it will drive you nuts if you are unable deal with weight fluctuations.

liftingbro wrote: »

Save yourself a lot of stress and only weigh in once per month. My body weight can fluctuate 10lbs one day to the next, it will drive you nuts if you are unable deal with weight fluctuations.

I've gained weight whenever I've switched to monthly weighing, most recently last year from Nov - Dec 29.

virginiajharris wrote: »

kshama2001 wrote: »

liftingbro wrote: »

Save yourself a lot of stress and only weigh in once per month. My body weight can fluctuate 10lbs one day to the next, it will drive you nuts if you are unable deal with weight fluctuations.

I've gained weight whenever I've switched to monthly weighing, most recently last year from Nov - Dec 29.

I think in that case though, you were probably weighing in a responsible way and aware that fluctuations happen. (and, I'm not sure using Nov-Dec as an example time period is the best).

But, if someone is weighing themselves and concerned about daily, normal, fluctuations stepping back and seeing only long term results might be a good short term solution. Even cutting back to weekly, rather than daily weighing might help.

Or, what really helped me was when I started using a weight tracking app. I makes it easy to see the big picture of "yes, I weigh two lbs more today than I did yesterday, but my average weight right now is 4 lbs less than it was last month".

To the bolded: If that's the strategy, I don't see how the short term solution results in any better long-term outcome.

I agree that's good advice for people who truly and profoundly can't handle the stress of fluctuations.

But it's pretty normal to have a bit of a freak-out at first about seeing the fluctuations, when we don't anticipate them, and (IMO) what can make it less stressful in the long run is knowledge of how fluctuations work in our own individual bodies.

If a person's stress level about it is manageable, if they could power themselves through a month or so of daily weighing without it being soul-distroying, the experiential knowledge gained can be calming and empowering.

Over time, daily weighing teaches a person experientially what commonly causes their personal fluctuations, how big they tend to be under various circumstances, and how long it takes them to drop off. Premenopausal women can begin to understand how their hormonal cycle interplays with water weight and affects the scale.

Really, only the individual knows whether it's way to stressful, or if they think it might be worth toughing it out for a while for the sake of the self-knowledge. When we see these perfectly normal alarmed posts about scale fluctuation, it's really hard for me as a 3rd party to know where they fall on that psychological continuum.

As an admitted longtime daily weigh-er, I've seen weeks where, if I'd only been weighing weekly, I would have thought I gained several pounds (eek!) that week, when what was really happening was an easily observable overall gradual weight decrease with a bit of a wobble to it, such that last Thursday (or whatever) was an unusually low day, and this Thursday an unusually high one. That's less likely with monthly weigh-ins, but not impossible if there are 5-pound daily swings in context of losing around a pound a week on average.

I'm not saying everyone should weigh daily, but I also think it's equally too facile to say that anyone who's alarmed at first would be better off weighing only occasionally because daily is "too stressful". Each individual can think about whether the potential for gaining experiential knowledge is worth a period of stress while gaining that knowledge, for them.

Speaking only of myself now: I'd been weighing myself daily for literally years, even graphing it as a daily dot on graph paper before trending apps, even before making any serious attempt at weight loss (I'm a data geek, not an obsessive ). That was extremely helpful to me once I started losing, because I already understood that my weight would fluctuate, and could see that there was an underlying pattern of slow, steady longer-term loss amongst the expected daily ups and downs.

That's not going to be true for everyone, but I think the tradeoffs are worth thinking about, for anyone. Just my opinion, obviously!