How often do you step on the scale?

I've logged my weight every morning (when not traveling) for probably more than a decade, even before I started trying to lose weight. (I'm not obsessive; I'm a data geek, in ways other than this one, too.) Before starting to use a trending app (Libra, in my case, because Android), I put a dot on graph paper (date, weight). I have those going back years.

Once I started losing, that history was a great help. I'd already internalized what my weight fluctuations could be, how big they might be under various conditions, how long they'd take to drop off, and that sort of thing. That took a lot of the emotion out of it, for me. (It also helps that by nature I'm a very unemotional person ).

So, it was no surprise and not a source of stress when I saw fluctuations during weight loss. In fact, they usually looked smaller, because they were sitting on an overall down-slope weight trend.

That background knowledge helped me trust the process of logging: If I didn't cumulatively eat 3500 calories over maintenance, I didn't gain a pound.

I think it would be harder to start this during weight loss, especially if someone who is a little more inclined to feel stress about bodyweight, but I think that some might find that an ongoing record has that same kind of calming power in the long term . . . it just takes an effort of will to get to that point. (This is a case where a smart scale that automatically logs might be a help, for a time . . . though watching the changes while one's daily behavior is fresh in mind is where the explanatory gut-level understanding comes from, IMO.)

This is not an approach that will work for everyone: That's not what I'm saying.

It's definitely true, though, that there were weeks during weight loss when a weekly weigh-in would've told me I was gaining when I was actually losing (I think that would be stressful!), and in maintenance it's still the case that a once a month weight could be misleading in that same way. (In January, I've ranged up and down from extremes of 132.6 to 136.6 so far; In December it was 132.4 to 137.4. If I'd weighed on the 11th of each month, I would've seen 134.2 in December, and 136.2 in January: Pseudo gain, when I'm actually very slowly losing. And those aren't the only date pairs that would yield that misimpression.)

I think there's value, for anyone for whom it's possible (i.e., not everyone everyone) to work on internalizing the idea that scale weight is just a momentary snapshot of bodyweight's (plus its temporary food/water contents') relationship with gravity, not in any way a metric of one's worth as as human.

Personally, I don't believe we have a "true weight", but rather a current weight range (of fluctuations through a day, up to a small number of weeks), and a longer term weight trend (uphill slope of the current ranges if gaining, horizontal if maintaining, downhill when losing; over a period of several weeks to months and years).