Yesterday I ate a lot, and the scale showed it this morning MOL, although perfectly within the normal range of variance. It’s not something I’m specifically worried about, because I ate well - it’s just that lettuce tends to hang around in my system for a while, and I enjoyed a big salad yesterday. It was the perfect lunch. I bought a chicken breast from the grill, and made a nice salad at the salad bar, then combined the two for a great meal.
But the sheer volume of food made me wonder today if I would prefer to collect weight data less often. I take a lot of data daily: weight, time I weighed in, how much I’ve been eating (high-med-low), how long since my last BM, did I use portion control. Additionally, on Sparkpeople I measure how many glasses of water, some food elements, both cardio and strength exercise, and several other goals, like am I paying attention to my goals and continually learning.
So far I haven’t been using the scale as a personal value judgement, but I did at least decide to think about weighing in weekly as opposed to daily. Benefits to weighing daily are:
- I love the data and the completeness for analysis purposes
- It’s possible to cross-check volume eaten, water intake, BM, etc. against a short-term measurement
- I learn more about the variation in weight and how I cause it
- I know how reliable my weekly assessment is, and can focus on averages rather than once-a-week measurements
Benefits to NOT weighing daily are:
- Don’t have to make sure I’m not making a personal value judgement based on weight
- Don’t have to rationalize any day-to-day gain or loss
Not weighing seems to just enable laziness. Don’t like that - I’ve got a big enough lazy bone as it is, and I think recovery goes better if I am not lazy about it. Well, it seems I prefer to enjoy the benefits of weighing daily. Done. I’ll continue.
Here’s my latest chart. The yellow line is the moving average, and you can see during the first month or two how I measured both morning and evening, trying to get a sense of how my weight varied overnight. That was absolutely amazing to see that I could lose a kilo overnight, just in sweat and urine.
