When trying to lose weight it is important to keep track of your progress in an objective fashion. The majority of us do so by weighing ourselves, but what is the best way to approach this?
“Should I weight myself? If so, do I do it every day or once a week?”
This depends. In any case, some form of self-weighing is generally a good strategy to obtain objective feedback on your progress, whether it be daily or weekly. We do recommend daily or weekly weighing to most people trying to lose weight.
As far as whether it should be daily or once weekly, it depends on you. Daily weighing can help keep you focused, on track, and engaged with your plan. Some people, however, find themselves getting overly fixated on the numbers or on incremental gains and losses, which can be the result of water weight fluctuations, changes in bowel patterns, etc., so daily weighing for some people isn’t helpful.
We recommend giving it a shot! Start weighing yourself daily. If you are able to use that feedback in a constructive way, keep it up! If you find your day being ‘made or broken’ by the number on the scale, back off of it! Try once a week instead.
The National Weight Control Registry, one of the largest studies performed to determine what makes people successful in maintaining weight loss found that 75% of their participants who successfully maintained weight loss weighed themselves at least weekly. This indicates that continuing to weight yourself regularly, at least once a week, may help you in the maintenance phase.
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