There’s a lot of conflicting information pertaining to how often you should weigh yourself — daily, bi-weekly, weekly. But it all boils down to one simple piece of advice:
Losing weight is predicated on weighing yourself regularly.
It doesn’t matter if you weigh yourself weekly or daily. The single easiest thing to do when losing weight is to measure your weight. Knowing how you are tracking to a weight loss goal is CRITICAL to weight loss, which is something that every expert and study agrees on.
“Losing weight is predicated on weighing yourself regularly.”
Some “health experts” argue that weighing yourself daily can be demoralizing as everyone’s weight fluctuates on a daily basis for a variety of reasons that aren’t always in our control. These “experts” argue that you should weigh yourself weekly, in the same state of dress, at the exact same time, with the exact same scale to get consistent results. Other “experts” believe you should weigh yourself every day at the same time in order to get more accurate tracking of your weight in discrete time periods — and they point to research that corroborates that daily weighings are highly correlated with successful weight loss.
The truth? You will be fine if you weigh yourself weekly or daily. The single most important thing is that you step on the scale consistently and record your weight. If we had to choose, we like to weigh ourselves more often than not (i.e. daily).
If you don’t have a scale and are looking to purchase one, we would recommend the Withings WiFi Scale. But it is costly ($99) and there are other scales that are much, much cheaper. The main advantage of a WiFi Scale is that they can seamlessly upload your weight data to a mobile app and chart your progress — to give you a better sense of how your weight has changed as your progress through your weight loss journey.
Conquer your fear of the scale. It takes less than 5 seconds to weigh yourself but you’d be surprised at how huge of a difference it makes in terms of setting you up for success in achieving your weight loss goals.
- Motivatr