All about weighing yourself

Weighing yourself can be a stressful thing to do; many of us overweight folks may not want to even know how much we weigh, and seeing our weight go up when we're exercising and eating better and expecting it to go down can be quite disheartening.

Add to that the fact that there are SO may things that can can affect your weight at any given time (such as when you last drank or ate, when you last peed or pooped, when you last exercised and lost water weight via sweat, what clothes you're wearing, whether you might be retaining water, scale accuracy, time of day, and more), it can be a formula for disappointment.

I have noticed that my weight can vary a lot. Once over the course of 24 hours I noticed my weight varied by more than 6 pounds. And my digital weighing scale can vary from one moment to the next by as much as 1.8 pounds depending only on where I place my feet on the scale.

Therefore, follow these tips to try to be as consistent as possible when weighing yourself to get the most accurate results:

• Research various weight scales a bit and try to buy one that is known to be accurate over time
• Calibrate your scale. This isn't as hard as it sounds. If you have objects such as weights where you know exactly how much they weigh, put them on your scale to see how accurate it is. If you don't have weights, you can try weighing yourself, then weigh yourself again while holding some bottles of water or soda. Each half-liter of bottled liquid will weigh about 1.1 pounds, so compare the weight before and after holding the bottles and you can estimate your scale's accuracy
• Be consistent about what clothes you wear. If you weigh yourself one day naked and the next day wearing boots and winter clothes, you're going to get wildly different results. You don't have to be naked when you weigh yourself, but try to wear similar clothes from weigh-in to weigh-in. I usually am wearing socks (no shoes), underwear, shorts, and a short sleeve shirt and I try to wear the same outfit for each weigh-in
• Be consistent about time of day. You may get goofy results if you weigh yourself one day when you get up, a few days later in the middle of the day and a week later before bedtime. Consistency = accuracy. I usually do my official weigh-ins about 30 minutes after my workouts, after I've had time to put on dry clothes and to re-hydrate a bit
• Don't have your official weigh-ins too often. We're aiming for losing one pound a week, so weighing yourself once or twice a week is enough
• When you get a chance, weigh yourself on a different scale. This is a good way to double-check your own scale's accuracy
• Very important: record your results

And, finally, don't get too discouraged if you see fluctuations in your weight over the course of a few days. There are just too many variables to think about. We're looking at the long-term here.

These fluctuations are why I think it's so funny when folks insist on proclaiming their weight to a single pound:

   "How much do you weigh, 200 pounds?"
   "No, I weigh 199"
   "So 200, then"
   "No, I weigh 199!!!"
   "Go take a sip of water; now you're 200!"

The stuff we drink

When I thought hard about what I consume, I realized that just in liquids I was consuming much more in a week than I initially figured. Forget calories for a moment and let's just think about how much the liquid we drink weighs:

• Water: the recommendation is 8 8-oz. glasses per day. That's a half gallon, or about 4 pounds of water per day
• Milk: I consume about a gallon per week mostly on cereal. That's about 8 pounds
• Coffee: about 40 liquid ounces per day, or about 17 pounds per week.
• Diet soda: about a 12-pack per week, or 9 pounds

That's about 56 pounds per week of just liquid! Yikes. Granted, much of this gets peed out, but still, that's a lot of weight we consume just in liquid every week.

Please don't neglect your liquid input, especially water, just because of these stats. We know that drinking plenty of water is very important, and water has 0 calories so stay hydrated!