Daily weigh-in?

No. That's what the scale is for 🙃

No, I weight every day, and i know that weight fluctuates from day to day. There's no need to guess. It's just a datapoint, which in isolation is meaningless.

juanwilly1 wrote: »

yirara wrote: »

No, I weight every day, and i know that weight fluctuates from day to day. There's no need to guess. It's just a datapoint, which in isolation is meaningless.

Sorry but if your premise is that you know that weight fluctuates daily, why would you weigh yourself every day. I guess because I try to estimate the impact of the previous day's food consumption as it relates to that day's exercise/running. I seek a daily trend. But I guess for verification or negation of self-awareness.

Huh?

I do what yirara does, care about the trend, not the individual weigh-in.

But it's a basic truth of statistics (though loosely stated here) that the larger the number of relevant datapoints one collects over a given suitable time period, the more statistically reliable the trend calculation will be.

And yes, I do mean "calculation". I weigh daily, plug the daily weights into a (free) weight trending app, let it do the math to create statistical smoothing (looking backward) and projection (looking forward).

Apparently unlike yirara, I do sometimes try to guess what my weight change will be from the previous day, though I don't try to pin it down to a number - more like "I think I'll be up a couple of pounds this morning because of that big dinner I ate much later than usual", or "I should drop a pound or two today because of taking a longer break from strength training". As you say, it's fun to test my assumptions, confirm or critique my intuition. But it doesn't make me think that day is "good" or "bad" - yikes, no, for me.

One of the things I like about daily weighing (even though I don't put much importance in a goals sense on the daily datapoint, is that over time I've gotten a really good feel for how big my meaningless daily fluctuations are likely to be, what's likely to cause them, and how long they're likely to last.

Unlike you, I don't use the scale to evaluate yesterday's food strategies, or plan today's exercise. (I'm not saying what you do is necessarily wrong; individuals vary. A wide range of approaches can be reasonable.**) My exercise plans are on their own schedule, aimed at fitness and health goals, irrespective of body weight. (I was very active for over a decade while still staying obese.)

Nearly 7 years of calorie counting tells me that for me, yesterday's calorie level has less to do with today's weight than yesterday's sodium intake, timing of eating (residue still in my system or not), exercise intensity (so water retention), and things like that.

IMO, IME, a variation of a pound or more overnight (without a truly dramatic change in calorie intake or activity level) is about water weight and digestive contents on their way to becoming waste.

Fat loss is gradual, slower, in the background - it plays peek-a-boo on the scale with water shifts and digestive contents variations. How fast loss shows up on the scale is a function of a specific individual's non-fat fluctuation magnitude/patterns, plus their actual fat loss rate.

Example: It's normal for my body to fluctuate by 2 - maybe 3 - pounds day to day routinely, for no dramatic reason. If I'm losing half a pound a week (i.e. very slowly), it can take a month to see the loss trend clearly based on scale data. (Occasionally, it's taken longer!) If losing fast, like 2 pounds a week, the fat loss rate can still be murky for a week or more sometimes. (Muscle gain/loss (absent an emergency health crisis) is even slower than fat loss.) Now that I'm in maintenance, any actual fat gain/loss - unless I change my routine - is a slow, creeping thing . . . probably takes at least a couple of months of datapoints as trend input, to get a decent picture.

Losing or maintaining, I care about fat gain/loss, and muscle gain/loss. Neither of those things make dramatic changes from one day to the next, if I don't *massively* change eating or exercise (roughly 3500 calories per pound of fat, after all), and I'm not in a medical crisis. I don't care about water and digestive-contents variations, which tend to be bigger day to day.

** One quibble about that asterisked thing: I do see people here sometimes who over-rely on daily results (which I'm not saying you're doing), and have trouble transitioning to maintenance calories. They're eating (say) 1500, have been losing a pound a week, want to go to maintenance calories (or maybe just sensibly slow down loss rate when close to goal weight). They add the necessary 500 calories one day, see a couple of new pounds on the scale next day (can't be 2 pounds of fat from 500 calories, and a total right around maintenance calories). It's water/digestive contents. But they see the "gain", freak out, think (type here, even) "I can't go higher than 1500 or I gain weight!". That scenario is a problem. I'm not saying that's you, OP - just that we see it happen sometimes.