OK, so I’m just gonna cut right to the chase.
Body weight fluctuates naturally. A LOT. And if you set yourself a weekly weigh-in you’re doing yourself a disservice.
Why?
Because if you’re still in a diet mindset, I bet your bottom dollar if you stand on those scales on weigh day and see a gain even though you’ve been ‘good’ all week, that it’s gonna cause a meltdown.
“Sod it. I was SO GOOD! What’s the point? I may as well eat what I want tonight. Take away it is. And chocolate. Oooooh and wine. Lots of wine.”
Been there, done it, got the t-shirt.
The problem is, pretty much every single diet I’ve ever done has encouraged this weekly weigh-in. And over time I ended up developing a super unhealthy relationship with the scales and my weight, and ultimately, with food.
Such a shame when in reality you could have actually been in a calorie deficit all week, but that particular day hadn’t been to the loo yet, were retaining water, or one of many other reasons why weight fluctuates. If your weigh day was the day before or the day after, you might have seen a loss on the scales instead. And how would that have changed your mood, and how you went into the next week?
My personal preference at the moment is to weigh daily and use an average weight tracker app that shows my overall trend, not just my day-to-day fluctuations…
You can see here how much my weight goes up and down from one day to the next, but the yellow line is what I pay attention to.
There is a 9lb range here from my lowest to highest weight over the last 3 months, but what you can clearly see is that despite the daily ups and downs, after a couple of months of my weight creeping up, now that I’m focussed on my goal of fat loss, I’m bringing that yellow trend line back down again.
The app I use is called Weight Diary, there’s a free version and a full version available on the app store and it looks like this:
If you feel like daily weighing would be too much at this stage, then the alternative would be monthly weighing.
My goal is generally to end each month lighter than I started it, so you could weigh on the 1st of each month rather than week by week. This gives you enough time between weighing to see the impact over a more realistic time frame.
Where you are in your journey to ditch diets and move forward making changes without being triggered will play a big part in this. You need to consider what works best for you. Everyone is different and it’s not a case of one size fits all.
The most important thing with this process is to be your own detective. Pay attention to yourself. Try different things and really think about what works best for you.
Donna x