Learn how often to weigh yourself

The bathroom scale is feared by many. Weighing yourself can be an unpleasant experience, so much that so many people recommend not weighing yourself. However, the scale also provides useful data to see how your diet is progressing.

Should you weigh yourself and if so, how often?

Let me ask you a counter – question. Do you think it’s wise for an ostrich to bury its head in the sand when it’s in danger? Of course not, and neither does the ostrich, in contrast to a popular myth. Ostriches only stick their head in the sand to inspect their eggs. When in danger, they runaway or fight. Not weighing yourself because you’re afraid of what the scale might say is no different than burying your head in the sand, so you don’t see the lion coming at you. The lion is there, and your weight is what it is. Not seeing it doesn’t change its physical reality.

Weighing yourself provides objective feedback on how your diet is progressing. If your weight is trending in the desired direction, it’s good to see the positive reinforcement. If it’s going in the opposite direction, you may not like to see that, but you do need to, because it means you need to work on your diet. As such weighing yourself is a win win scenario. In contract to popular wisdom that weighing yourself is obsessive, scientific research overwhelmingly supports the benefits of weighing yourself.

Frequent weigh-ins are significantly correlated with weight loss compliance and weight loss success, as well as weight loss maintenance. Weighing yourself consistently also helps to prevent holiday weight gain and diets that involve self-weighing are more effective to lose weight than diets that don’t require weight monitoring.

Weighing yourself is not a burden. It’s a form of control. So, weigh yourself daily in the morning after having gone to the bathroom and before you’ve eaten. It’s a simple habit that requires only a trivial amount of time and it enables you to log your weekly average weight trend, which is incredibly useful data about your diet progress.

That said, weighing yourself at any other time of the day than fasted in the morning is futile, as your weight will be majorly confounded by multiple factors. Your weight goes down after you go to the bathroom. When you eat or drink it goes up. So, if you’re 2/3/4/5lbs heavier in the afternoon compared to the morning, all this means is that you drank an extra glass of water that you haven’t excreted yet. So always weigh in the morning.

More generally, daily weight fluctuations mean practically nothing. Several factors impact your day-to-day weight that say nothing about your physique.

These are not reasons to avoid weighing yourself. On the contrary, these are reasons to weigh yourself every single day so you can take the weekly average and use that as a more reliable reference point. Don’t worry about the day-to-day changes in your weight. Focus on the long-term trend of the weekly average.

On another note

6 Things your weight can’t tell you:-