Weight: 225.6 (-5.6)
Fat: 34.6% (-4.7%)
Meals: Not available
Exercise: Light Cardio (Treadmill 30:00 WL3 - 280 calories, 1.75 miles)
Pictures: Front/Side/Back

If you were paying close attention, then you may have noticed that yesterday was the first uptick in my weight since I started this a week ago; I started at 231.2 and lost consistently down to 227.4 before recording a 228.6 yesterday. Even though I knew better there was a slight twinge of disappointment when the number went up for the first time since I started.

Now today I plummeted down to 225.6 which changed my total weight loss over just one day from 2.6 to 5.6 pounds. In other words, I lost more in the last day than I did the entire first week. If I can continue to lose 3 pounds a day for the next month I'll drop almost 100 pounds!

So in just three days we have two examples of why you shouldn't weigh daily. The first being the occasional weight gain. How discouraging to spend all that time on the treadmill, lifting weights, turning down that second helping and carefully counting your calories only to put on weight over night! The second example of why you shouldn't weigh daily is because you sometimes get those extreme drops that can create unrealistic expectations. It's always wonderful to see big losses, but if you start to expect them, you're going to be disappointed.

This is why so many weight loss experts (and amateurs) suggest that instead of dealing with the emotional ups and downs of weight loss suggest you forgo stepping on the scale every day and instead do it only once a week. I've even seen suggestions that once a month might be even better. After all, if you go by the 1-2 pounds per week rule, that's only 4-8 pounds. Anything less than that can be lost in those ups and downs.

My personal opinion is that the solution to dealing with those ups and downs is not to weigh less, but to weigh more! It may or may not work for you, but here is my reasoning and why it works so well for me:

First and foremost, it's a daily ritual, a reminder that I'm trying to lose weight. I start every day by weighing and in doing so I remind myself that I have to work out today and try to be responsible in my eating habits.

Secondly, seeing those numbers go up and down every day makes me realize that there's a lot of "noise" in measuring your weight. Your body weight actually changes throughout every day. Every drink of water you take, every bite of food, every time you go to the bathroom, even every time you take a breath, you are changing your body weight. Weighing every day helps reinforce that this variation is okay and natural.

Third, if you graph your weight data (as I plan to when I get enough data), you can start to get a real feel for your weight loss, whether you are headed in a positive or negative direction and just how rapidly it's happening. The best example I can think of is stock prices.

You can search for company's stock price and find out how much it gained or lost in its last trading session. A 5% loss today might be an indication that the company is in trouble. Maybe the latest version of their flagship product is going to be a flop and investors are bailing. Maybe they've announced earnings and instead of making a billion dollars in profit they only earned 900 million. But today's gain or loss isn't all that important if you're not buying or selling the stock today.

Instead, take a look at the one year chart and you might find that the stock has doubled in value over the last year. Or maybe it's been in free fall all year and about to go bankrupt. If you pick just two closing prices over that year though and suddenly it's hard to say which direction the company is going in much less how rapidly. Maybe you picked a good day in a very bad quarter, or a really bad day in an otherwise excellent quarter.

The fact is, two numbers tell you very little about an overall trend. Three numbers tell a little more but still not much. A hundred data points though allows you to see a pretty clear trend, and makes it easy to decide whether a particular number represents a random outlier, or an accurate representation of progress. Weighing once a week over three months gives me just 12 numbers. Weighing every day gives me approximately 90.

In addition to charting the data, you can also use the extra measurements to average out and find a more accurate number that takes away some of the randomness of the daily measurements. Every week I'm averaging my weights for each day. I will then compare that averaged number to the averaged number of the next week. Instead of worrying about an especially good or bad number skewing my results, the averages provide a more consistent number to compare to.

So where does this variation come from anyway?

Water. Okay, there's more to it than that I'm sure, but most of the movement you're going to see on your scale comes from how much water you are or aren't retaining. Let's do a little (simple!) math here:

We're expecting to lose 1-2 pounds, hopefully all fat, every week. Muscle will weight more than that and might offset that number, and even if we measure calories carefully and records accurate numbers from our workouts, there's going to be some variation in our calories in to calories out ratio, not to mention genetic disposition and metabolism, etc. So some weeks we might end up losing nothing, some weeks we might double our weight loss.

Assuming we lose 1 pound on average, that's 0.14 pounds per day. My scale has tenths of a pound, but I really don't know the margin of error on it. I've also seen scales that change in increments of 0.2 pounds and many scales that only have whole numbers. So under ideal circumstances, our daily weight loss may not even be detected, or is within the margin of error of our scale.

On the other side of the spectrum, we're drinking a ton of water a day. I really need to be drinking more water, but when it's summer out and I'm sweating a lot, I can easily go through more than a gallon of water a day. Food adds additional mass, and contains even more water that's added to our system. But for the purposes of our simple math, let's say we drink/eat a gallon of water a day. A gallon of water weights eight pounds. So every day, leaving food mass out of the equation, we're consuming 8 pounds of water.

Some of that water is lost by urination, some of it is sweated out and still more is breathed out. Yes, breathed out... you know how you fog up those mirrors or windows with your breath? That's water vapor. It's the reason you weigh less when you wake up than when you went to sleep. But some of that water is retained by the body to fuel your body processes. Depending on a number of factors, your body may choose to release some of that stored water, or it may choose to increase your stores. Congratulations, you just gained or lost several pounds in 24 hours.

Think about that... at best you're going to be losing 0.14 to 0.28 pounds of fat per day, but you're drinking 8.0+ pounds of water. Any fat loss you see on the scale is going to be completely hidden by those changes in how much water you are or aren't retaining today vs. yesterday. That's why we care more about the long term trend than the day to day numbers. Who cares if you lost 2 pounds today or gained a pound overnight? It's noise. Random fluctuations in water retention.

But while that retained water weight will vary within a range, losing fat is gone forever. Eventually those numbers will drop and you can see the true weight loss outside of the range of that fluctuation.

How to minimize ups and downs

Although you can't eliminate this random variation, there are steps you can take to reduce it. Since you eat and drink throughout the day, it's best to find a time of day where you've eliminated most of those solids and liquids. Assuming you've gotten a full night's sleep, you've gone roughly 8 hours without consuming anything, and chances are you've gone to the bathroom very shortly after waking up. My morning ritual involves heading straight to the bathroom followed by a trip to the scale.

If you don't already, get naked before you step on the scale. I didn't talk about clothes but I hope it goes without saying that shirt, pants, dresses, shoes, etc all weigh something. Depending on the amount and type of material, they can vary quite a bit as well. Take it all off and get an accurate measurement.

Lastly, don't weigh yourself wet. Not everyone has as much hair as me, which can take hours and hours to air dry. But weighing after you jump out of the shower can add some numbers to the scale that don't have to be there. Try to weigh before you jump in the shower or soak in the tub.

Whether or not you choose to weigh daily, it's important to know that the numbers your scale gives you are fuzzy to some extent. Treat each measurement as if there's a built in margin of error. Gaining a pound overnight or even over a week, doesn't mean you aren't losing weight, it may very well mean that you had a bad day. Remember, look at the long term and don't sweat the day to day stuff.