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On Weighing Every Day
Submitted by Dana on Fri, 2010-07-09 11:36
Years ago, somebody I know (looks innocently at the sky, whistling) stated, in print, that weighing one's self is a pretty lame way to judge how fat one is. One could go with the fit of one's clothes, or perhaps a tape measure.
The person who said that now weighs herself faithfully every single morning. Well, except when out of town. And I might buy a travel scale, though I still can't figure out how that would work on a cruise, what with the ship moving and all.
Having gained back... well, considerably more than I would have wished of my initial weight loss (I would have wished for none,) and having finally knocked off the cookbook weight, I am determined not to regain a second time. I like being a size 10.
To this end, I have vowed not to let my weight creep up more than a couple of pounds before I take stern action to knock it back down again. Today, for instance, I am having an All-Meat Day -- nothing but meat and eggs, no dairy, no veggies or fruits, no sugar-free chocolate, certainly no alcohol. I'll probably have another All-Meat Day tomorrow. I need to work on recipes, but I'll have to cook for That Nice Boy I Married, whose weight sits rock-steady where it's been for a decade or more. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not gaining weight for this cookbook. I refuse.
A lot has been written about how often we should weigh. Many feel that weighing once a week gives a clearer view of what our bodies are doing than will be derived from every little up and down. This may well be true. And there is no question that I was right when I wrote all those years ago that weighing yourself doesn't tell you whether you've gained or lost fat, since it measures all of you -- water, intestinal contents, bones, hair, muscle. On the other hand, I didn't own a scale for years, and fooled myself that since my size 14 jeans still fit I couldn't have gained that much, could I?
However, I now have a scale -- a Weight Watchers model -- that tells me my weight, body fat percentage, water percentage, bone density, and BMI. This gives a clearer picture -- if my weight is up, but my body fat percentage is down, I figure I'm retaining water. On the other hand, if my weight is up, and so is my body fat percentage, I'd best do something about it right away. (I'm also glad for the bone density reading. Severe osteoporosis runs in my family, and I so seriously do not want to go there.)
I weigh myself on this scale every day, and yes, I see all the daily fluctuations, and yes, I probably get worked up about minor fluctuations that don't matter. On the other hand, as everyone reading this knows, it is entirely possible to gain five pounds in a week. I'd rather notice when the first couple of pounds go on and do something about it, rather than wait a week and have to get five extra pounds off.
The bottom line is that attention is a powerful tool. Indeed, it is a rule of science that observation changes the observed. When I track what I eat, I'm less likely to gain. The same seems to be holding true for observing my weight: If I'm up a pound in the morning, I'm less likely to grab "a little something" even though I'm really not hungry. That consciousness of being uncomfortable with the direction my weight is headed acts as a gentle deterrent. The very act of paying attention changes how I eat and exercise, and therefore acts as a brake on weight gain.
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Back to square one - sadly
In 2008 I used HCG shots and the 800 calorie diet and lost 22 pounds. But, I got comfortable and now I have gained back all the lost weight plus five more pounds. I am so disgusted with my self. I just want you to know that reading your books and blogs are going to help me get back to a healthy weight. Yes - I love sweets - but they do not love me. Dana - Thank you for all that you are doing to help us be healthier people, If I had weighed daily I perhaps would not be in this situation again. I so disappointed in myself. But the fight is on and the low carb lifestyle will be my ally!
Delta Weight
I actually just started using the Delta Weight app on my iPhone, and I find it to be pretty useful. (I know the developer, but bought the app just like anyone else, and I don't get paid to promote it. I just like it.) I used to weigh myself once a week, but couldn't figure out what the ups and downs meant. I'm really not good with numbers. But seeing the trend line is pretty useful, and even if I don't weigh myself EVERY day, it still shows me where my weight loss is going.
I don't bother weighing myself on vacation. When I get back, I check to see the damage. :) I actually only gained a couple of pounds on my latest vacation, but lost it again this week.
Weighing every day
I read somwhere that Julia Child weighed herself every day. If she was 3 pounds up, then she cut back hopefully not on butter). So if the divine Julia did it....
I Weigh Myself Everyday, too!
It is good to know that I am not the only one who weighs everyday.I tell everyone that this is just one tip that has kept my weight off. I can catch weight creep this way. There is no way I can go my clothes to see if my weight is the same.
Please keep up the good work you do spreading the low carb message!
to the person who said a nurse got on your case for weighing
Please ask that nurse how we monitor CHF patients and fluid balance DAILY WEIGHTS in the outpatient setting . If one has a weight problem it stands to reason that a schedule of weighing oneself is an easy intervention to be incorporated into any careplan. Please continue to weigh yourself and track your weight. If weighing yourself daily increases compliance so be it. I applaud your dedication to monitoring your own weight.
Daily weighin
Yeah, I agree 100% I tried no weighins and fooled myself to think I was on track WRONG I gained 12 pounds. Daily weighins are key to keeping on track and following the ups and downs, making me strive for downs with more focus, and yes I would hate to weigh in once a week on that one day I am up for whatever odd unexplained reason (we are not machines)
Thanks for the scale link I may just get one.
And A LC cruise, who organizes these, where do i get info?? What fun that would be!!
And Dana, I love YOU!
Eating only protein for couple of days.
I wonder about this. If I tried this, and I'd love to, wouldn't I be creating an acidic condition in my body and creating constipation?
Do you include fiber when you do this?
Just wondering.
Eating only protein
Keep in mind that an all-meat day doesn't mean only protein; a good fraction of my calories are coming from fat, my preferred source. According to my records, yesterday I ate 1203 calories, and got 58% of those calories from fat. That's low for me, but still, hardly an all-protein diet.
Secondly, I keep hearing that meat will cause an acidic condition in my body, but every time I've tested my pH it's been just slightly alkaline, just where it should be.
I'm agnostic about the whole acid/base controversy; I find it interesting but unproven. I have noticed, however, that the charts purporting to show which foods are acid- and which are alkaline-forming don't all agree. One thing they all list as acid-forming is sugar, so I'm ahead of the game right there. Some of the charts show grains, as well.
As for fiber, I'm unconvinced of its all-around wonderfulness. I think the reason high fiber diets appear beneficial is because A) fiber-bearing carbs are easier on blood sugar than carbs with no fiber, B) the best source of fiber, vegetables, brings along other beneficial substances, and C) starch is basically paste, and if you eat a lot of paste, you need something to help move it along. I see no reason to eat a bunch of separated fiber, though. I wrote an article about this for CarbSmart a while back.
Too, keep in mind, I rarely eat an all-meat diet for longer than a week or so; it's just too dull, and anyway, I have to come up with recipes, it's my job. You can eat nothing for a week and be fine, so I don't see why eating meat and animal fat for a week would be harmful -- especially since Eskimos did it their whole lives, and were healthy.
That said, I don't see why you couldn't take, say, sugar-free Metamucil during a stint of meat-only. I just don't bother, because I don't see it as important.
Paying attention is exactly
Paying attention is exactly what it's about.
I had a nurse jump on me a couple of years ago who insisted that weighing every day was compulsive and I shouldn't do it. Well, I thought, OK, I'll try that approach. Before I knew it, I had gained 10 pounds, and by then I was on a roll. Well, by the time I came to a halt, I had gained an additional 10! Talk about not being healthy!
My weight doesn't get put on in one place when I gain, so it was very easy to still fit into my clothes. Conversely, when I lose weight, it takes a 20 pound loss before I'm even starting to change sizes.
I'm all about the weighing!
Yeah, the cruise thing just
Yeah, the cruise thing just doesn't work very well, when it comes to weighing. Most ships I've been on do have a scale in their exercise rooms, but it's absolutely impossible to get an accurate weight (plus, it's not YOUR scale if you don't bring it with you, so it is going to be different). I always like to take the weight I get when the ship's moving downward into a trough, not the one I get when it's moving upward :-)
Seriously, I think that a good 90+ percent of people really let loose on a cruise, and thus, do not want to weigh. I think they figure they'll face the truth when they get home (though there IS the growing die-hard fitness contingent, which I am happy to join). But you and I know that for people like us, that doesn't work at all, and for the most part, we like the foods and want to eat the foods that we know are good for us, even on a cruise. I have lost a little weight more often than not on a cruise, or at worst, only gained one or two pounds. Makes it possible for me to cruise guilt-free, and I do SO love to cruise.
Cruising and Losing
On two out of the three cruises I've been on, I've lost a pound or so. There's so much great low carb food to be had, who cares about the junk? Steak, rack of lamb, great salads, lobster tail -- and at breakfast, all the bacon you can eat without cleaning up the grease.
My only real indulgence on cruises is to drink every night. On two of the cruises, I danced like a maniac every night, so I burned it all off. This past one I mostly was yakking with folks in the bar outside the karaoke lounge.
You coming on the low carb cruise in May? We're already looking forward to it. I was dreaming about cruising this morning!
LC Cruise
Yes, I think I probably was the first one (or nearly so) to put in my reservation for May 1st, picked my cabin (chose an aft wrap), and am now looking at airfares (boo - wish the cruise was still sailing out of Galveston!). Hubby and I will be celebrating our 19th anniversary that day, so it seemed fitting, and besides, who needs an excuse to cruise? I'd rather cruise than....do just about anything! I have three cruises scheduled between now and the LC Cruise.
I am lucky in that I just have no interest in drinking. On occasion there will be some complimentary champagne, but since I never drink it doesn't take much to make me glad I have hubby to hang on to! And it leaves me more money to spend on .... whatever else suits my fancy (which is usually their wireless package)!
On my first cruise with Carnival, I had heard so much about their Chocolate Melting Cake, I felt like that one indulgence in a year was okay.....but I paid for it by being sick for the next two hours. It was good, though! Just not good enough to be worth getting sick over. And it was, after all, something I could probably easily reproduce at home LC if I just tried.
Chocolate Melting Cake
That's one of the recipes I've been asked to decarb. Looks like I'd better take on the challenge!
I do wish they'd come up with some flavor of sugar-free cheesecake other than vanilla...
I like vanilla because you
I like vanilla because you can do so much with it....any flavor on top is great. Of course, you don't necessarily get your choice of toppings (if there are any at all) on the cruise, so I get your point. (I swear, it is so tempting to bring along some of my own favorite food items on a cruise....now isn't that dumb? But at least I'd be getting something I really wanted!) It is, indeed, a little disconcerting to see everyone else get a choice of fifteen flavors of cheesecake, and for us it's a choice of only three: vanilla, vanilla, and vanilla :-)
constant weight
I know the advice against weighing everyday is based on not getting obsessed about the daily ups and downs, but I find that my weight is remarkably constant. I have a digital scale & it doesn't vary more than two-tenths of a pound from day to day unless I have had a carby treat the day before. My weight normalizes within two days just by going back to my regular eating plan.
How does the scale DO that?
Hey Dana,
How on earth does the scale know your body fat percentage, water percentage, bone density, and BMI just by stepping on it? I'm amazed that it can do that, but I'd sure like to know how it knows??
How does it do that?
It sends a very mild electrical current through your feet (or rather, through my feet) -- not enough to feel. Something to do with how the body resists or conducts electricity; it's called bio-electrical impedance. Not considered the gold standard of body-fat measurements, but it's good enough to keep a rough eye on where I'm headed.
You do have to program your height and age into the scale, so it's also doing some calculations.
weighing in on weighing in...
I weigh in every morning after going potty. Same time, same semi-dressed state. I do not get on the scale any other time of the day---no exceptions. Mine also shows the BMI/water readings but not the bone density reading...that could be cool!
I think I dreaded weekly weigh-ins much more than a daily weigh-in. The "not knowing" is always the worst.
My morning ritual is unemotional -- merely a time for contemplation over my previous day's food choices.
Using a trend line helps
I weigh myself every day with an iPhone app called "deltaWeight" that I (full disclosure) write and sell. Trend lines are great because they eliminate the noise of daily weight changes. There was a period of about two weeks where I thought I wasn't losing any weight at all, but once I got the trend line feature on my app working I could see I had been losing at about .1 lbs a day. There's no way to see that without some statistical averaging.
For people who don't want to use an app for this, a pen-and-paper method is described in the Hacker Diet. I wouldn't recommend anyone follow the Hacker Diet's nutritional advice, but the math is useful.
I'd like to second the notion
I'd like to second the notion that daily weighing has to go with statistical averaging - I've got a spreadsheet that gives me a 7-day moving average and some trending functions. One thing it's made clear is that there really is a definite stall-whoosh effect related to my TOM - I can see the slope of my trendlines change. :)
Weighing every day
I totally approve of weighing every day if for no other reason than you don't miss an especially low weight!. However a few years ago my weight wasn't making sense and I finally discovered DH had "adjusted" something so he thought the scale was more accurate, which it wasn't. Boy did he get it! Anyway, I finally spent the money for a real doctor's type scale that is very reproducible and definitely worth every penny and no one else is allowed to use it.
BTW, those fat % things are based on a correlation with people who had real body fat measurements under water so they aren't all that accurate. However, they do seem to be consistent from day to day. Don't forget that the formula depends on the height and age that you set it to so if you change those numbers you might get a surprise. If you are going to keep track, multiply the fat % by your total weight and keep track of how much your fat weighs. That should not change by very much from day to day.