Weighing yourself every day does not give you enough data; your weight can fluctuate throughout the day, from day to day and depends on many things, including hydration levels, menstruation, stress & illness. If you were measuring something important, you would not go on data from one day to the next; you would choose a larger time frame to collect more accurate data. The same is true with your body weight; looking at it weekly will give you a clearer, more accurate result, and your head won’t be filled with useless figures from every day beforehand.
Don’t weigh yourself everyday!
Instead, weigh yourself once a week at the same time and stick to that. Feel free to wear the same thing if you want to or nothing if possible. Remember that you will be heavier if you weigh yourself with clothes on in another environment, such as the gym!
Are you working out & putting on weight?
If you follow an exercise programme, have a personal trainer, go to the local gym or do anything exercise-based, you are training, and training affects your weight!
Why? Resistance-based exercise, and to some degree also aerobic-based exercises, actively act to increase muscle tone and definition, leading to an increase in muscle fibres changing. Subsequently, changing the size and shape of muscles is what “bodybuilders” do; it’s their main goal, but it also happens to ‘average Joe’ training at the gym to a lesser degree.
The reason why this matters is that muscle weighs twice as much as fat. A little tone and definition will, therefore, change your weight (yes, it could make you heavier)
I always tell my clients not to expect any real difference in weight within the first six weeks due to the fat and muscle trade-off. Once this has settled down, you will start to see a weight reduction. However, if you have been monitoring body fat percentage or lean body mass, you will likely have seen the positive results of training before this point.
Scales that also take your body fat percentage will give you much more information than just your weight and help you understand why you might be heavier or lighter.
Worrying about that ‘number’ affects our habits.
When you concentrate on your body weight, you subconsciously make decisions that, more often than not, adversely affect your weight and make the problem worse. This leads to more bad choices and more weight gain.
If you notice that you are heavier, you’ll likely start eating less and less often or cut out a food group to make up for your gain next week! Every one of these things will make you put on weight. When you eat less, your body goes into starvation mode, and your metabolism slows down. The key is to keep it ticking over by eating good, healthy food at regular intervals with healthy snacks.
When you see a good number on the scale, you are lighter, filled with joy, and want to reward yourself! A cake or some chocolate you have been craving, which again is a situation that will lead to weight gain.
This all sounds like a no-win deal, and it often is. People struggling with weight loss will face these problems. My best advice is not to weigh yourself more than once per week and, if possible, get scales that also take body fat percentage and/or lean body mass.
