Obsessed with weighing myself

harper16 wrote: »

Weighing yourself daily or twice a day doesn't seem like an obsession, for most people on here including myself that's normal. I like seeing the daily trends. If you are more comfortable going without a scale and relying on clothes, or other measurements there's nothing wrong with that. It's all about what works best for you.

Obsession isn't really about how often you weigh yourself. It's about your mental and emotional relationship to weighing yourself. A "normal" behavior for one person can be obsessive for someone else.

I weigh daily, and I can say I'm a little bit obsessed, not with weight per se, but with dieting data in general. Love calories, love weight numbers, love activity numbers, low how they all compare and connect and interact. Love to jigsaw food items into my calorie budget. I just love numbers in general. It's not the bad kind of obsessed, more like fascination. If obsessing with the scale doesn't affect you negatively you can just accept it, we all have our quirks. If it leads to anxiety or takes you into an undesirable headspace, you can use other ways to estimate your progress, like clothes or pictures.

The same behaviour CAN be obsessive for one and not obsessive for the other.

Heck, I can personally engage in the same behaviour and it could have been obsessive yesterday and not obsessive today, or v.v.. So mental state and viewpoint has a lot to do with things!

slunburg wrote: »

General daily weight fluctuations are normal.... but I know that won’t necessarily give me any more of an accurate picture of what my weight is really doing

You mentioned in another thread that you're losing 1-2lbs a week and it feels like watching paint dry

Actually 1-2lbs a week is a very very fast rate of loss, especially if you're not currently morbidly obese.

When losing 1-2lbs a week, it is likely that a once weekly weigh in will provide a fairly relevant picture of what your weight trend is doing.

Why? because you're operating at a loss level of 4-10lbs a month. And for *most* people's normal weight fluctuations are probably in the sub 5lb range.

But what happens when you are operating at a loss rate of 1lb or .5lb a week, or like I did the year+ before entering maintenance, at less than 1lb a MONTH?

Are you not losing weight then?

I would argue that 11.1lbs lost in a year (and not regained during the past four) argues that it was a valid loss!

But how do you *see* a sub 150 Cal a day deficit if you only weigh yourself once a week, or once a month, or even less often, and on May 17 you weight in at 163 when back on March 14 you weighed 161?

Did you gain 2lbs during two months of careful attention to what you were eating, or did you lose the 1.7lbs your weight trend says you lost?

How would you know this if you didn't have the intervening points to plot the trend?

(arguably: maybe you don't NEED to know this--but, I, for sure, did feel that I needed to know I was progressing instead of regressing!)

I used to weigh myself multiple times per day and record my weight every single morning. On the one hand, it seemed to make more sense than weighing once per week. Due to regular fluctuations, sometimes my weight would be a pound or two higher for seemingly no reason, and then it would be gone the next day. If that was my one weigh in day for the week, I would have thought I worked so hard all week and didn't lose anything, and then might decide to give up. I also found that if I was "off track" I avoided the scale like the plague, so it felt like an accountability piece.

After doing the yo-yo thing numerous times, last summer I decided to try setting my weight loss goal on here to 1 pound per week. That gave me more calories per day and I had a much easier time sticking with it. However, when you think in terms of days or weeks, 1 pound per week seems really slow. I also had another issue- I was starting out far heavier than I've ever been. So even though by the end of the summer I'd lost about 10 pounds, as expected, I felt like it didn't matter because I was still "really fat." When some stressful things happened in the fall I fell off the wagon all together because I felt like it didn't matter that much- I'd worked hard all summer, but I was still huge.

So I started again on January 1 with the same plan, except for NOT weighing myself. I have been pretty consistent since January 1 and I haven't weighed myself once. It's actually been very freeing. I've focused on how much better I feel, both emotionally and physically, when eating right. I've seen changes in how I look and I've gone from a size 18/20 to a 14/16. I figure at some point, I will go back to weighing because it will be harder to lose when I'm smaller and I'll need to be much more exact. But at my current size, I'll still lose if I just stick to my plan.

This is the longest I've ever managed to stay totally on track before, so I'm feeling pretty good about it. I have a feeling if I were looking at a number on a scale, I'd feel less good about it because I'm definitely still overweight and the number isn't "good." I will say, one thing that made me confident in trying this is that this isn't even close to my first rodeo. I know how to track/log accurately, weigh things accurately, use my fitbit to get an accurate activity level, etc. I think for someone who is new to this, it's important to weigh in and track weight over time to make sure you're actually doing everything correctly.

Another thing to note is that it takes awhile to change sizes, so you have to be patient and that may not work for everyone as far as tracking results that way. I've also found that with clothes, I can obviously feel mine getting looser but I get trapped into waiting for something to happen like literally zipping up my pants and then having them fall down to my knees before thinking I need a new size. At least on my body, it just doesn't work like that. My clothes were super loose, but they "stayed up" (not very well when walking/moving around) so I felt like I hadn't changed sizes. Then I went to get some new things and discovered I was TWO sizes smaller!

I also seem to be in the minority in that I see changes pretty quickly when looking in the mirror. Before when I was weighing myself, I'd be happy that my face and arms would start to look slimmer almost right away, but then be disappointed because I hadn't really lost that many pounds yet. A lot of people here seem to be the opposite- even if they've actually lost tons of weight, they have a hard time seeing it and feel like they look the same. If you're one of those people, seeing the hard numbers may work better for you.