Imagine going to work daily, logging into your online banking account, and checking your balance expecting to see a deposit for a job well done yesterday.
It’d never be there, you’d grow increasingly frustrated and disappointed, you’d start to question your value, it’d be a losing endeavor all the way through, right?
Yet so many that are working on their health and their bodies hop on their scale every morning and totally hand the scale complete and total power over their emotions.
If the number is anything other than lesser than yesterday’s number, on comes the stress. The sadness. The disappointment. The frustration. The anger. The questioning of their worth.
In reality though, even for one doing all the things right with eating, moving, hydration, and sleep, and on track for successful fat loss, most days the scale *will not* show a decrease.
In my experience, most common cadence is something like 2-3 decreases per week, the rest increases. The increases tend to be smaller intervals and so the net change each week is dropping and dropping. But daily scale weights do a poor job telling that story each next morning…
Early on in my coaching career I heavily insisted on daily weigh-in’s.
We know all the reasons we should weigh in more often, right?
Best data possible, better weekly averages with more data points, rule out outliers, blah blah blah, etc etc etc.
We know stress, sleep, hormones, hydration, recovery, plus a hunch of other things, can play in and skew the scale and cause increases.
That said though, for some (many?), weighing in daily is entirely counter productive. In fact, for some (many?), the scale is actually a stressor and has no value in their regimen.
Progress pics, clothing fit, energy levels, day to day FEEL, there are plenty of ways to spot progress that do not include the scale at all.
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Zooming out even further, if we are really truly being honest with ourselves and taking active ownership of our body, our health, and our choices…do we really need any external metrics to validate the work we’re putting in?
If we asked ourselves end of each day, “If all of my days went just how today went, would I be improving or regressing?,” would that not be more than plenty?
Key part there of course is the honesty it requires, which makes or breaks it.
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Anyhow, the scale?
If you can view it and what it offers objectively, as data, and hop on and move on without another thought, it’s worth using.
If it stresses you out and your daily # plays into your emotions and affects choices later in the day? Likely not worth it at all.
