Daily Weighing - An Alternative Perspective

I'm going to suggest something that every personal trainer or weight loss expert you've ever spoken to has told you is a cardinal sin that should be avoided at all costs. I am suggesting that you weigh yourself every day. What? That's crazy! Surely you should only weigh once a week, or even "throw away the scales, it's just a meaningles number"? Well, let's look first at the very good reasons that your expert will tell you not to weigh every day:

• They know that your weight will fluctuate, possibly by quite a lot, from day to day due to factors such as hydration and even how much food happens to be hanging out inside your body. They don't want you to be demotivated when you gain weight.
• They don't want you to obsess over a number, when that might lead you to make choices that could compromise your overall health and fitness plan (like starving yourself so that you can lose that extra pound).

These are both good reasons not to weigh every day, but let me now give you some reasons why weighing daily and (very importantly) tracking and analysing it could help you out:

• While your trainer doesn't want your "meaningless number" to de-motivate you, that number (especially when you have a lot to lose) also has incredible power to motivate you.
• We've accepted that your weight can fluctuate a lot from day to day, so what if your one weekly weigh in is on a day that you have fluctuated significantly upward? Now you're demotivated for a whole week thinking that you're a failure.
• When you weigh every day, you'll see your fluctuations in intricate detail, so much so that you will expect them (and even predict them), and come to accept them as a natural part of your weight loss. You will no longer care that you have gained weight, because you know that it is only temporary, like it has been many times before.
• You can also get useful information from your fluctuations, for example if you lose a massive amount of weight in a single day then it probably means that you're losing too much water and can be a motivating factor to hydrate yourself properly.

Right, if you're convinced then let's start doing it, but there are some ground rules and tips that I think will help you along the way:

• Use a spreadsheet and make a line graph so that you can se all your results visually. Numbers do tend to be meaningless unless you're a maths whizz, but a graph is easy to understand
• Set the bottom of your graph to be your ideal target weight (so you can get some context). Don't make the bottom of the graph zero, that's just silly, because you're never going to get anywhere near it, and all your weight loss will look like a useless, mostly flat line.
• Overlay some other data to give yourself even more abilty to judge your progress. My graph has a line that shows a straight line from my start weight to my "easy goal" (a rate of weight loss that I should be able to easily achieve) and another to my "stretch goal" (a rate of weight loss that I don't expect to achieve, but would be nice). This gives me a "glide path" to try to stay within. This is useful not only as a motivator, but also to help you make things easier if you are being too aggressive (i.e. if you are rocketing down below your stretch goal line, maybe you should back off a little and make your life easier while still achieving your goals).
• When you've been doing it for a couple of weeks, you'll be able to see how much you as an individual fluctuate from day to day. Look for the biggest fluctuation you can see (in my case about 2Kg) and mentally set that as your margin of error. Now only mentally consider yourself at a given weight when you have dropped below it enough to account for the margin of error (for example, when I dip below 105Kg, I pretty much ignore it. I only consider myself "at" 105 when I hit 103 at least once).

In a few days i'll provide a link to the spreadsheet and chart that I use so that you have something easy to use as a starting point. Let me know how you get on!