I’ve been doing a little experiment over the last week.
Normally I weigh in on Tuesday mornings, whereas my wife weighs herself every single day. She says that she prefers the daily check-ins because it gives her a better sense of how she’s doing throughout the week, whereas traditionally I’ve always preferred to keep it to once a week because the slight fluctuations tend to drive me nuts. That said, just out of random curiosity, I thought I’d try it her way for the last week and see what I thought of it…
As much as it’s a little depressing to see that I gained a couple of pounds since last week, I still think that I do ultimately prefer only weighing in once a week because I just don’t want to have to deal with those results on a daily basis. We know that losing weight isn’t necessarily just as simple as burn more calories than you consume, weight goes down – there’s also muscle growth and water retention and other random bodily happenings taking place in there, so unless a daily spike happened to coincide with my eating a ton of extra food, there’s not really a whole lot I could do about it anyways! Even then, it’s not like from Monday to Tuesday I ate an extra 9,800 calories of food to cause myself to gain 2.8 pounds literally overnight!!!
That said, last weekend Sara and I did help each other take some body measurements (waist, chest, thigh, etc…) so that we can start to look at how those numbers are changing over time, so I think that’ll be interesting to compare alongside the actual weight loss because I totally understand that strictly losing weight isn’t a good metric when it comes to improving your body. Obviously for us overweight folks it does happen to be the big one because reducing the waistline coincides pretty firmly with pounds going down, but some of the others will look at less fatty areas that may actually have muscle growth, which is something that I’ve never really focused on much in the past because, hey – priorities! 🙂
I think we’re only going to do the body measurements once a month or so. Maybe every two weeks if we think about it, but I don’t see as big of a rush with those because it’s more long term change that we’re looking to track.
Now just to get that line inverted before next Tuesday…