Daily assessment will increase daily commitment.
Measurement is like laundry. It piles up the longer you wait to do it.
— Amber Naslund
EDITORIAL DISCLAIMER: Any advice or recommendation given in my writing is what works for ME and may not be the best regimen for you based on your psychological or physiological makeup and stability. Please consult a doctor when making decisions about your health.
Each morning I finish my 30-minute workout, take off all of my sweaty clothes, and press the power button on my scale in my bathroom for it to warm up.
It’s one of those fancy scales that I brought about 8 years ago that takes your BMI, weight, and gives you a calculation of what your metabolic age is.
Each morning as I step on it and wait for the number, I‘m always interested to know what number is going to come back as it tells me what I need to know to continually control my diet and create the body I desire by controlling what and how I eat.
Sometimes I am a bit disappointed in the number, while on other days, I am pleasantly surprised.
For all of those days, however, I always feel that I get an assessment of what I need to continually do to stay focused on my weight and fitness goals and how I am going to get there.
There are several reasons why I am a big fan of daily weight assessment, and why I would encourage anyone else to do the same.
Weekly readings can be misleading
I know a lot of people that ask why do they have to do it daily when they can just do it every week and save themselves so much time.
After all, the goal is to lose weight over time isn’t it, so should it matter if they know where they stand one day per week or every day?
The difference is being able to really understand how you are trending each day as opposed to where you end up at the end of the week.
What I mean by that is that you can only be down 1lb on Sunday when you weigh yourself and feel tremendously discouraged because of all the hard work you put in.
What this one Sunday reading doesn’t tell you is that you were actually down 6 lbs on Friday night and then you decided to have a monstrous cheat meal on Saturday that went a bit overboard and negated all that hard work you did for the week.
Therefore, instead of being encouraged that you were able to drop 6lbs in one week, you are instead discouraged because you are only seeing the end results of being down an accumulated 1 lb for the entire week.
Weighing yourself and seeing this progress daily should encourage you that your efforts are working and reinforce the fact you actually CAN control your weight if you stay committed to the right behaviors.
You will learn to do more of what helps and less of what hurts.
In regards to these right behaviors, weighing yourself each day is the best way to identify exactly what these are.
As alluded to above, when you weigh yourself each week, you lump all the data from your previous week’s activity into one single assessment. What this prevents you from doing is understanding the daily decisions that were made that got you closer to your goal versus those that took you away from it.
As shared above, if you are down 6 lbs on Friday and then take a massive cheat meal on Saturday, you will only see the result of that one lb loss.
Understanding that this one meal had such a dramatic negative impact, you can then look at what you ate that day and ask yourself what can you cut out or substitute sustainably that will allow you to feel like you are still cheating but still seeing the gains you desire.
Everyone’s body is a bit different and sometimes our body even reacts differently to different foods.
Therefore, there is often a 24–48 delay in your body’s weight change based on what you are doing.
What this means is that if you do a hardcore cheat day on Saturday, all of it might not show up until you weigh yourself on Monday, so you need to understand that to see which behaviors you need to change each day.
Also, when you weigh yourself daily, you may notice that certain exercises allow you to drop more weight than others.
By analyzing what exercises are giving you the most bang for your buck, you can then customize a program that works best for your body, as opposed to guessing what is helping versus what is only have minimal success.
You will learn specifically how your body reacts to different foods.
And lastly, by weighing yourself each day, you will get a sense of which foods hold you back the most versus which ones have the least weight gain impact versus the pleasure of having them.
This will allow you to assess your cheat meals and decide if the amount of damage it does to your weight loss goals is worth the pleasure that it gives you when you have it.
What this will allow you to do is make better choices to tailor a diet that is specific to your needs and taste buds.
For example, if you love apple pie with ice cream but notice that every time you have it, you end up adding 5 lbs in one sitting, then you could ask yourself is there another food that you could substitute that could give you the same pleasure that would not be as damaging as apple pie.
This may take a bit of experimentation and research, as you learn how your body reacts to sugar versus fat versus carbs, however, you’ll be amazed and how you can still have certain foods with much less of an impact once you figure it out.
Figuring out what combination would have the least effect on your daily weight change will then give you a sense of how to structure your diet accordingly.
Conclusion
Weekly weighing is easy and convenient but very few things about weight loss typically are.
If you want to ensure that you are putting yourself in the best position to learn what you need about your body, how it reacts to exercise, and how it reacts to different types of foods, daily weighing is the only way to go.
And while weighing yourself daily can seem like a bit of a pain and tedious at first, the benefits of doing so far outweigh (pun intended) what you’re missing by not.