I Weigh Myself Every Day. Should You?

[spoiler title=’Click For Transcript’ style=’default’ collapse_link=’true’]hey everybody my name is Kayla and I weigh myself every single day and if you’re trying to lose weight or trying to maintain your weight loss I think you should do the same thing now I know probably some of you are gonna push back against the idea of weighing yourself I was there right there with you in 2014 and didn’t want to weigh myself I just refused to know the number I didn’t want to be beholden to the scale or chained to the scale I don’t want to obsess about my weight so I did three other things consistently to try to track my progress but I found problems with all three of those so here’s what I tried the three things that I did were I measured myself every week I took progress pictures of myself every week and then I also tried to pay attention to how my clothes were fitting so let’s talk about measuring yourself okay when you measure yourself it’s difficult okay like to try to accurately measure it like your arm and you’re trying to do it with one hand and you’re trying to see it and record it accurately it’s just difficult and even if you’re trying to be really really accurate with it it’s hard to remember from one week to the next exactly where did you measure and how much did you suck it in because quite frankly you can really be way off depending on how much you suck it in or not out of curiosity yesterday I thought well how much would it really make a difference and so I measured my waist like just you know it’s kind of slouching and not sucking it in at all and then I tried sitting up really straight and really sucking it in and I was able to get a 5 inch difference there and that’s that’s pretty considerable actually even if you’re not trying to cheat and give yourself a little win not to say that I ever did better anything but it’s still hard to be accurate so the second thing I did was watched how my clothes fit right which is seems like a good idea except for I was in denial about what size I should be wearing so my jeans were way too tight and since my jeans were way too tight you know what happens if you lose even 5 pounds and your jeans are way too tight your jeans are only slightly less way too tight so it’s not a very good way to really tell from you know week to week how you did also if you’re like me you might wear your jeans like seven times in a row before you wash them and they get really comfortable and they start feeling really loose and you start feeling really good about yourself until you wash it and dry it and then you’re like oh crap they’re not loose anymore okay and the third thing was progress pictures now progress pictures are great and I encourage you to certainly do it because it’s great to see like how far you’ve come but week to week they don’t tell you much and so to show you what I mean I’m gonna show you a picture of when I first started taking progress pictures and the other one is a year later and so I can’t tell a difference and and I don’t know what the if I was exactly the same way or not because I wasn’t weighing myself so now let’s talk about the scale this is my healthometer we got it at Walmart for like 18 bucks so now let’s look at that last picture I took before I started weighing myself and then we’ll compare it to one year later and then we’ll take the final shot which was like after I started intermittent fasting and walking consistently that was at the end of my journey so certainly you can see a difference over you know 65 pounds you can certainly tell a difference I want you to think like a scientist okay a scientist needs good reliable non-biased data and so the great thing about weighing yourself is that it’s easy it’s fast and it’s super accurate like my scale is you know basically to within an ounce of my weight and there’s no way to really cheat it you know the scale is just gonna tell you the number okay so you might say well what about just once a week instead of every day wouldn’t it be better and I’m gonna say no and here’s why thinking like a scientist you want as much data as possible right and if you only weigh once a week then you’re only getting like one data point every week right but if you weigh every day suddenly you have seven times as much data so you can form better conclusions if you weigh yourself every day you’re gonna have a more consistent and truer picture of what’s going on with your weight to give you an idea since I’ve been tracking every day for about two years now I’ve noticed there have been weeks actually my weight has fluctuated by 6.4 pounds and that’s a lot now what kind of thing would have happened if I had only weighed that one day where I was the heaviest or that one day where I was the lightest I would have a totally different picture of what was going on with my body so if you do it every single day it’s gonna become a habit and that’s what you want you want to be a habit that you just get into every single day I wake up I go to the bathroom I step on the scale and then I log that number into my app so even though I’m weighing myself every day my daily number isn’t really the one that I paid the most attention to I really pay more attention to my seven-day average and so and that’s exactly what it sounds like I just take the numbers from the previous seven days and I average them together I have that on a spreadsheet and I’m gonna give you the template in case you’re a nerd like me and you like data but what the seven day average has done for me is it helps me to not celebrate too quickly like if I see a weight loss but then I also don’t despair too quickly either if I see a gain on the scale it just it helps to kind of even out my feelings on everything and probably most importantly it helps me make intelligent decisions about my plan and what’s helped me is to just take a very long view so in other words I don’t even look week to week what’s working I look at like months like you know at least a month’s worth to say okay over this past month I was doing this is it you know where am I trending am I trending up down am I staying the same so what if you’re nervous and I get that because I was very very nervous before I weighed myself but I will say that if you can just get up the courage to do it once and commit to just saying I’m gonna weigh myself every day and that’s just what I’m gonna do is just gonna be my habit it gets easier really fast and then eventually it’s no big deal at all so that’s why I weigh myself every day it was certainly a turning point in my weight loss journey and my encouragement to you would be just try it you know try and commit to it for the long term just say I’m gonna do this for the next year I’m just gonna weigh myself everyday for a year and then that way you can make intelligent decisions about your your plan what’s working what’s not and instead of having to go based on emotion [/spoiler]

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Resources

Click the button below to download the 7 Day Weight Tracking Spreadsheet (.ods file).

Want to know your BMI? Check it below:

[bmi][/bmi]
Understanding your BMI according to the CDC:
Underweight = <18.5
Normal weight = 18.5–24.9
Overweight = 25–29.9
Obese = BMI of 30 or greater

My scale on Walmart.com, if you need to buy one and want something cheap and dependable.