Daily weigh ins vs. weekly weigh ins

"Should I weigh in every day or just once a week?" It's a common question. And I'm going to give an answer that is very true, but one I think people don't hear enough:

Scientifically speaking, you should probably weigh yourself every day.

Now, this is a post I've been mulling over this for a while. Erin (who, by the way, has a great blog that I'd encourage you to check out) commented on a post of mine not too long back that "the almighty 'they' discourage weighing in daily." And in terms of the diet world, she's right. Weight Watchers, Spark People, and most other diet plans and diet books say you should only weigh once a week. The typical justifications are that the scale can change greatly from day to day, meaning it's not all that accurate, and that there are emotional downsides with seeing false losses and gains throughout the week. Essentially, conventional wisdom in the diet world says that weighing yourself every day can discourage you and stress you out. But conventional wisdom isn't always right.

Weighting yourself every day is actually a good idea according to science. A 2005 study showed that "Dieters who weighed themselves regularly shed more pounds over a 24-month period than people who didn't regularly weigh themselves. Those who weighed themselves daily lost the most." Another University of Minnesota study "found that those who weighed themselves daily lost an average of 12 pounds over 2 years; weekly scale watchers lost only 6. The once-a-day group also was less likely to regain weight loss." And there are more studies out there with much the same message.

So weighing daily makes you likely to lose more weight and keep it off once it's gone. But what about the emotional damage of daily weigh ins? At least one study in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology says that's a myth. Here's what they found:

Several recent studies suggest that daily weighing is important for long-term weight control, but concerns have been raised about possible adverse psychological effects.
...
We found no evidence that increases in frequency of weighing or daily weighing per se had any adverse effects in this study population. Rather, increases in self-weighing were associated with increases in dietary restraint (p less than 0.001), decreases in disinhibition (p less than 0.003), and decreases in depressive symptoms (p less than 0.002). Moreover, those who weighed daily at 18 months were less likely to report having = 4 binge episodes per month (p = 0.03). Daily weighing appears to be an important aspect of weight loss maintenance and was not associated with adverse psychological effect.

So there's scientific evidence that weighing daily isn't emotionally damaging. It even seems to decrease depression and binging! And why are we supposed to weigh in weekly, again?

The answer to the question "should I weigh myself every day or once a week?" seems to be every day. Scientifically speaking, if you want to play the probabilities, you should step on your scale every day.

That said, just because something is likely to be right for you doesn't mean something is right for you. If you're not comfortable with daily weigh ins, then you shouldn't weigh in daily. It might be that you get extremely depressed by stepping on the scale, or that you truly can't stand seeing the fluctuations. Maybe for you this journey is more the emotional or even spiritual aspects, and that while you do want to track your weight, you don't care much about the numbers. You need to do what works for you.

My advice:

Seriously consider weighing in every day. It may not work for you, but there's some good evidence that it more likely to work than you might think. But, at the end of the day, trust yourself. If you don't want to do daily weigh ins, don't do daily weigh ins. Stick with weekly, monthly, or whatever else makes you happy. The right answer for you might not be the right answer for everyone else. And with that in mind, next time you hear someone mindlessly parrot the diet industry's standard "you shouldn't weigh yourself more than once a week," let them know that science, at least, says otherwise.

Oh, and to answer the requests from yesterday, I will review the Body Bugg once I get mine. It shipped last night, and should be arriving on the 22nd.

Tuesday Weigh In

Weight: 258.2
BMI: 44.32

Well, it is what it is.

The good: I'm down 1.1 pounds from last week. I'm down 1.2 pounds day to day.

The bad: I'm up 1.5 pounds from a few days ago. I'm also up back over my 20lb mark. And 1.1 pounds is the lowest weekly loss I've had yet. It's also not acceptable in terms of pace for any of my goals.

Still, a loss is a loss is a loss is a victory. Right?

I'm sort of scared to be in this general neighborhood on the scale. A little over a year ago, I attempted to lose weight using Spark People. I stalled in the upper 250s (257.8 was my old low, with 275 as the starting weight) and eventually gave up. I'm not pleased with how much I ate on Saturday and Sunday, and how little working out I've been doing of late. (Only 30 minutes of cardio last night, when I'd been planning 45 + weights.) I'm very, very worried I'm going to go off track and screw this up.

I need to be committed. I need to have an iron will. I need to get through these next weeks and get out of this upper 250s death zone. I don't want this to be for naught. Now, more than ever, I need to stay the course. I can do this.

Fun with Graphs

As I've brought up a few times, I keep an Excel chart of my weight loss. I do this for several reasons:

1. I'm a nerd.
2. Recording day-to-day makes me more accountable
3. It's good to look at when I'm losing motivation
4. I have a lot of fun doing so

Today, I'm going to share some of the fun graphs I have, why I have them, what they mean, and how they help.

The most basic graph I keep is just one of my overall weight loss progress. As of today it looks like:


I've been lucky thus far in mostly having consistent losses, but that's not always the case. While the scale is a good overall judge of progress, it's a very noisy instrument. A lot of the time it'll pick up that your dinner last night was salty, or that you're bloated, or that you're dehydrated or that it's that time of the month, or a variety of other things rather than the actual truth of what's going on. This is the reason many people will just weigh themselves once a week: they just want to get an overview of the numbers, they don't want to deal with the day to day noise.

While I see the appeal of that, getting a reading once a week doesn't make your readings more accurate: it just gives you one data point to go on, and you don't know if it's actually your real weight showing up. There is, however, a solution for that: the moving average. So, I have a chart that shows my real weight, and the five day moving average. (For the first 1-4 days, I did an average of how many days I had data for.) As long as you're losing weight, even if you have days you go up and days you go down, the moving average should head consistently downward. Take a look:

Notice how on July 10th, even though I gained .8 pounds and saw a sharp spike in my day to day weight, the moving average of my weight was still falling. The moving average tends to be more valuable if you are having more up and down fluctuations than I am at the moment, but I still like having it for when I do get those--and if my previous attempts at weight loss are any indication, I eventually will.

Now, neither of those are the coolest chart I have.

One of the big things they advocate at Spark People is attaching deadlines to your weight loss goals. Some sort of "A wish + a deadline = goal!" cheese. To a certain extent, I think this isn't optimal: set your goal too low and you end up not really challenging yourself; aim too high and you're in for a sea of disappointment. If you use Spark to track your weight (or Fitday, and perhaps other weight loss software I'm not familiar with), they'll have one static line for your goal. If you're not closely racing the line, it's really not all that helpful: if you're well under or well over it, it's really not showing much about how your most recent progress is comparing to what you need to get to. (Spark will also only track one weight goal at a time, which I find relatively annoying.)

As of now, I have three goals: one short term, one long term, and one long term stretch.

My short term goal is to get to 250lbs by September 15th. The date is arbitrary, but the poundage is meaningful. 250 will mean I've lost 28 pounds, or 10% of my starting body weight. (Technically, the 10% mark will be met at 250.2, I rounded.) 250 is also just a big milestone number, and it seems to work in many ways. The 9/15 date was picked just by playing in calculators: 10/1 seemed too easy, 9/1 too harsh.

My long term goal is to no longer be obese at my brother's wedding, which will mean getting to 175 by August 14th, 2010. My long term stretch goal is to not be overweight by my brother's wedding, which would mean hitting 145 or below by the same 8/14/2010 goal. To be 100% honest, I would be overjoyed and incredibly proud of myself with either. For now, they're just giving me benchmarks.

My favorite chart makes use of all three goals. It's aim is to answer the question of "how much sustained weight would I need to lose per week to hit my goals of 250, 175, and 145?" It looks like this:

I'm also going to show you guys this as a table, since I think it's helpful to look at both:

There's a column for date, weight, days till 9/15, the average amount of weight I'd need to lose each week to get to 250 as of that day, the days till my brothers wedding, the average amount of weight I need to lose each week to get to be not obese, and the same for not overweight.

What I like so much about this chart is that I can see how well I'm doing relative to how well I need to do to hit my goal. Every day I lose .4 pounds or more (the equivalent of 2.8lbs/week), all my goals become easier. When I lose .3 pounds a day (2.1/week), my short term goal and the "not obese" goal are both easier, but the road to my stretch goal becomes slightly harder. .2 pounds day (1.4/week) and everything becomes harder.

But the best part is, those rules aren't constant. Not too long ago, a .3 pound day was bad for my short term and stretch goals. When I started my short term goal, it meant losing 2.8 pounds a week. Because I've been above pace so much, I now only need to lose a smidge more than 2 pounds a week. Progress!

There are a few reasons I like this standard so much. One of them is that it's forward-looking: all the other stats just judge progress thus far. This one is more about how each day will impact the rest of my journey. Essentially, every day I do an awesome job makes the days ahead easier.

The thing about my goals is, while they're there, and I like using them to measure progress and stay on top of myself, they're not really what I care about. Yes, it would be nice to look fabulous in my brother's wedding pictures: I'm going to have to see them for years and years to come. But, relative to how much I care about the reasons I'm actually doing this, it's meaningless. I care a bit, but it's not really what I care about.

I care about my future health: I don't want to get diabetes, or heart disease, or all those other things that being obese makes me more likely to get. Most importantly, I don't want my weight to hold me back any more.

I want to sit on airplanes without feeling bad for the person sitting next to me. I want to be able to run if I need to and not get winded. I want to go to the beach and not feel like I shouldn't be wearing a bathing suit. I want to not be scared of amusement park rides. I want to just live my day to day life without there being things I can't do because I'm too damn fat.

The goals and charts are just window dressing, they're not what matters. But they help me get through the day to day, and keep me solid when I want to stray. The charts help prove what I inherently know: each day I do a good job makes the next day easier.

So, I took a before photo . . .

A few before photos, actually. They're really bad. Like, really bad. Like I feel terrible I've made everyone look at me for all these years.

No, I'm not sharing.

Maybe when I've lost a bit and want to share progress I will. But for now they can be my icky "omg gross" secret. I intentionally wore very tight clothes for the photos to make the difference easier to see later on, but YEESH. I'm very, very sad faced at the moment.

So, when I started up this whole diet thing, I joined Spark People again under a quickie name that I just made to set up an account. I'd been using that for the past few days, for tracking purposes, but had been intentionally not participating in the community. A little over a year ago I lost a little under 20 pounds using this account.

I'm excited to actually rejoin the Spark community. I still remember a few people from there fondly, and especially one of the groups called Done being the fat girl. So, I am excited to get back into that, and to get started again with everything there. My new account name over there is HalvingHadley, so please come on by and visit.

Since I'm not posting a before photo, I will instead post the current excel graph of my weight loss. I've definitely got a trend going:


Anyway, that's where I'm going to leave it for now. Have a nice night all, and I'll report in with a number tomorrow. (Or with random insomniac musings in a few hours.) Again, fearing a gain, but I suppose we'll see what happens.