should i weight myself

It depends on your personality and you MUST be honest with yourself!

Some people get sooooo discouraged if they see the scale rise a pound or two and quite. Well, the scale only reflects your current weight at that moment and sooo many things can effect it, TOM, sodium, time of day, bowel habits, etc.

If that will freak you out only weigh in once a week or once a month.

To be honest, I weigh myself everyday. If I do go up I look at my diet to see where my sodium levels are and usually that is the culprit or TOM.

I do not get freaked out but find all of it motivating!!! If I am up, I work harder that day, if it is down then I am encouraged!

I balance my daily weight with measurements and how my clothes feel etc.

Best of luck to you.

I do not own a scale, nor do I intend to ever own a scale. I have always monitored myself by my waist size. When the waistband on my pants get too snug, then I know I've been slacking and kick up the exercise and/or watch my diet better (by diet, I mean making sure that I am eating sensibly - I do not 'go on a diet'). I am 47 years old and have worn the same size 8 since high school because I manage it this way.

Let me give you an example of how weight does not matter - just before I became pregnant with my daughter (in my early 30s), I had been heavily involved in Tae Kwon Do and worked out hard 5-6 times per week. I was in incredibly good shape, very little body fat - and still wearing a size 8. When I went in for my first pregnancy weigh-in, I weighed 146 lbs. I am 5' 7". In the weeks that followed, because I was pregnant, I backed off of the hard workouts and stopped 'sparring' in TKD class because I'd already suffered a miscarriage a few years earlier and wanted to be careful. As a result, I began to lose some of the muscle so that at my next weigh-in - wearing the same size 8 clothes - I weighed nearly 10 lbs. less! I looked no different, but because muscle is more dense than fat and weighs more, the scale went down as I lost muscle. Still wearing the same size 8 clothes.

I think that a tape measure is much more sensible than a scale. People get way too fixated on numbers. Get to the size clothes that are a reasonable size for you (and I do mean reasonable - I can wear a 6, but I prefer breathing!) and make sure you stay there. Do it by sensible eating, not 'dieting'. Exercise regularly and reasonably.

There are several bonuses to this method: you will be healthier, happier, feel better about yourself and you save a lot of money on clothes since your size will remain the same!

I hit the scale first thing in the morning every Monday. Also I try not to put expectation on what I am going to see before. I know if I've been doing the right thing.

The other hard part about it is if you are in strength training weight measure gives little insight to what's happening. In the last 3 months I've lost 15 pounds but I've lost 5 inches around the waist. So muscle is heavier than fat so take that into account when looking at your numbers.