How often should you mount your home scale? What’s important to be strict about when weighing yourself? What frequency of weighing is considered normal and what frequency is considered obsessive? And most importantly, is the home scale even accurate?
Most of us have a love-hate relationship with our home scale. Some scales have a place of honor in the shower or bedroom, and some scales are pushed under the bed or tossed in the attic.
What are our weighing habits?
Some people rarely weigh themselves, and some people weigh themselves even before they had their morning cup of coffee. Some weigh without any clothes on, and some don’t even bother taking their shoes off.
Does it matter?
Actually, it doesn’t. The way you weigh doesn’t matter very much, as long as you maintain a consistent environment every time.
What environment?
First, you must consider clothes and shoes. If you decided to weigh yourself without clothes on, make sure you do so every time you weigh yourself so you’ll be able to observe the change. If you weigh yourself with clothes on, but are too lazy to take your shoes off, make a point to weigh yourself with the same pair of shoes every time, so the scale can maintain the correct gaps.
What else is important to be strict about?
You should also weigh yourself during the same of day, at the same hour more or less. This means that if you weigh yourself in the morning, make sure you keep weighing yourself in the morning, and if you weigh yourself in the evening, make sure to continue to do so around that time. Otherwise your weight will fluctuate based on parameters not related to weight gain or loss, but that relate to the time of day.
Are these parameters significant?
Yes. Sometimes they can mean the difference of 3-4 lbs (1.5-2 kg) between morning and evening.
Should I weigh myself at home?
Weighing every one or two weeks can be an excellent tool to maintain your figure. A regular weigh-in helps us ensure that we don’t exceed our desired weight range for our height and age.
So there’s no problem weighing at home, every day?
Frequent, daily weighing or even weighing several times a day may indicate a problem. Our weight doesn’t change within hours in terms of fat tissue (maybe in a fantasy or a commercial trying to sell something), therefore weighing during the day will only cause stress and won’t indicate weight gain or loss.
So what should you do?
If your scale makes you feel stressful and you find yourself obsessively wanting to weigh yourself every single hour, get it out of the house! But if we’re talking about relatively infrequent weighing, that’s okay. If you weigh yourself and find that you’ve gained significantly, set a time frame until your next weighing, during which you can set a goal and make a plan to return to your previous weight.
So weighing every so often isn’t a problem, right?
That’s not entirely accurate. A problem lying in the “tiring” of the home scale can arise. Most home scales are based on a spring connected to a dial that moves between figures when you mount the scale. These scales get “tired” and weaker as years go by. After 3-5 years on average, they show a slightly lower value than our real weight (and that value gets lower and lower as time moves on).
So as long as you use the same scale and see the same basic range of numbers, you will be able to tell if you’re going up or down. But the main issue is that we’re not always aware of our true excess weight. So if we go into a clinic or have a personal consultation with a dietitian and get weighed in any of those places, we might be surprised and discover that we’re “heavier” than we thought, based on what our home scale showed us for years.
What can we do?
Aside from weighing yourself at home, it is recommended to get weighed in a medical clinic every few months. Most family health clinics have a scale in the waiting room or by the nurse’s room that’s available for the public.
Make sure that the scale is calibrated and balanced, which means that the scale is zeroed. Only then should you mount the scale and check your weight. If this is too complicated for you, and you don’t feel like fiddling with all the weights to find out how to make it work, you can always ask the nurse or family doctor to help you out.
What’s next?
Don’t forget, if you’re a member of the Trim Down Club, you’ll have access to many tools to monitor your weight and observe your personal progress. One of the tools we recommend using is the Progress Meter. Once you’ve weighed yourself and completed your profile with your weight and height, be sure to update it every time you weigh yourself. This way you’ll have a visual tool to help you see your progress and reassure yourself that you’re on the right track.
I just joined yesterday. And am really looking forward to getting healthier.
Yeah, just started today. My wife says that if I would just quit drinking vodka and fruitjuice with ginger ale, and eat SOMETHING during the day I would lose a ton of weight. Just not programmed that way…so I guess re-programming is the answer. I’ll let you know if switching to southern comfort and club soda, and eating somethinmg during the day helps. Fortunately, I LOVE vegetables and love to cook.
Starting today, not putting it off till new year. Involved in sport all my life , but now that my playing days are over and no more regular training sessions, I am finding it much tougher to control my weight. My work is now office based so I am getting even less exercise. I hope this works
Well said! I agree with all comments, and I weigh nude every morning before I have even a sip of water to take a morning pill for thyroid. Then once a week I record my weight on this web site to see the trend.
I am so encouraged by your approach to losing weight. I never had a weight problem until the last few years and I never had to be concerned with dieting. Now, I’ve put on so much weight and it seemingly doesn’t stop! This approach sounds so valid, reasonable, and doable. I am anxious to get started and also want to help my husband who is a diabetic with cardiology disease and weighs 280 lbs. We both NEED an approach that we will maintain not just to lose weight (belly fat included), but to maintain an eating lifestyle that we works. At one point in my life, how I looked was my primary motivator, but now it is how healthy can both of us become again, and possibly avoid serious and life-threatening weight gain. Thank you for making this available at such a reasonable cost and with a money-back guarantee. With nothing to lose but unwanted weight, we are going to work hard at this and hopefully have the success you proclaim!