Daily Or Weekly Weigh-Ins? May 17, 2006
I’ve seen a lot of weight loss programs that recommend you only measure weight and body fat % weekly. From what I can tell, they do that because those figures can vary so much day to day (and even within the day), that people get discouraged by the fluctuations and find it hard to “stay the course”.
The theory is that if you only measure once per week, the cumulative effect of 7 days of weight loss should overshadow the day-to-day variances and you’ll see a drop in your weight. That’s more encouraging than the swinging “Yay! D’oh! D’oh! Yay! Yay! D’oh! …” reactions you get from daily measurement.
While the idea has some merit, I think there’s a much better way.
My weight measurements can vary by as much as 4 kg (9 lbs) over a single day, and my weight loss for a week is usually about 0.7 kg (1.5 lbs). So if one week’s measurement was slightly low (say because I was slightly dehydrated at the time) and the following week’s measurement was slightly high (because I’d recently had a drink, or hadn’t gone to the toilet for a while, or whatever) then I’d be left thinking I’d ‘wasted’ a whole week on diet and exercise only to gain weight. That’d be pretty discouraging! Similarly, if I’d gone off track I wouldn’t see the result until the end of the week, and I’d do several days worth of damage before getting any feedback.
See my article on When To Weigh Yourself for more information on daily fluctuations, and what time of day to weigh yourself.
By using the Hacker’s Diet averaging technique, each day’s measurement only affects your running average by 1/10th of that day’s variance. So it takes a few consecutive ‘bad’ days before your average starts to trend up. Now instead of hoping to make every day equal to or lower than your previous day’s measurement, you’re just aiming to have more days below your average than above it. If you can do that, the average keeps going down and you’re losing weight.
Daily measurements and a focus on keeping the average trending down is a much healthier mindset. It allows you a guilt-free day off every now and then, while still reminding you to do the right thing more often than not and giving you rapid feedback if your trend starts to change.
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- Posted in : Diet, Measuring Progress, Motivation, Theory, Weight Loss Tips
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