Why I Weigh Every Day

A great portion of weight loss programs and many weight loss experts dissuade people from weighing every day or from weighing at all. For some, like Dawn at anewdawnforme.blogspot.com this works fabulously. Dawn is going by clothes sizes instead of pounds. (And she's doing an amazing job.) Me - I need a little bit more than that. I weigh almost every day. And it keeps me going.

This week showed a good reason of why I think weighing in daily works. On Saturday, I weighed 229, on Monday I weighed 236 because I believe I was retaining water due to a vigorous Pilates workout from Saturday which left me VERY sore. If I weighed in weekly and my weigh in day was Monday I would have shown a gain from the prior week even though I'd been pretty spot on in exercising and food choices. This would have messed with my head and I would have been very frustrated. I'd have to wait another week to see if I lost it all again and most likely would start depriving myself, starving myself, in order to see the scale go down again.

Discouragement is a weight loss killer. I see it time and time again where people have a gain and are so SAD. Then discouragement can equal bad food choices because our efforts feel pointless. I can understand that, especially if you've been working hard. Our bodies know what we need and keep what it needs to use.

Ultimately, you must do what works for you. For some weighing every day would drive them crazy. For me it is a stabilizer. If I have a loss, I post it to my weight loss ticker (which feeds to the chart at the bottom of the blog.) I don't post the gains because some days there is a .5 to 1 lb gain due to water retention I'm sure. But there's a pattern to the losses and it's a pretty consistent slope downward. That's what I'm aiming for. Consistency. Something for life. And it's working for me.