Weigh yourself every day
…but don’t bother too much with the daily variations
Your body’s metabolism is complicated. Whether you are trying to lose weight or build muscle, multiple factors are at play, so it’s never easy to correlate something you did today with how that will affect your weight tomorrow.
Nevertheless, if you want to understand how your body works, you’re going to have to take measurements and learn to infer trends. Measurements need to be objective, regular and under controlled conditions to be useful, and your daily weight is the easiest to start with.
- Get a digital scale. The brand doesn’t matter, nor do fancy features like WiFi and body fat analysis. Pick anything that has good reviews from Amazon, Flipkart or Snapdeal (but watch out for luggage and kitchen scales on those pages—that’s not what you want). Don’t use an analog scale. As mechanical contraptions, they are easier to damage and can get wildly inaccurate. You also want a reading with a precision of at least 100 grams and analog scales are typically marked at half kilo (500 gram) intervals.
- Find a spot in your house where the scale can be kept undisturbed. Digital scales need level ground and re-calibration if they are moved. Your readings may vary if you move it around as your floor’s level may not be consistent. Scales also tend to have “systematic error” which makes them read consistently higher or lower than the actual weight. This shouldn’t be a concern as long as the error is consistent. Test your new scale by stepping on it a few times. The first reading may vary significantly because some scales use that to calibrate. This is also why you shouldn’t change scales frequently—it doesn’t help you if you’re second guessing your scale.
- Weigh yourself every morning after you’ve been to the loo and before you consume anything, including water. If your bowels won’t move until you’ve had a hot drink, drink it, but remember that 300 ml of water is 300 grams on the scale, so you have to control for that variable. Easier to not consume until you’ve logged your weight.
- The weight of your clothes is another variable. If your night outfit is consistent (say t-shirt and shorts), the minor weight difference between garments shouldn’t matter, but if not, you will want to use a towel, or strip and weigh in the privacy of your bathroom.
- Don’t bother to subtract these variables (clothes, water consumed) from the scale’s reading. Log the reading as is. Any additional effort will throw you off the habit.
Despite all this, you may find that your weight varies from day to day by up to a kilo for no apparent reason. This is because last night’s food may still be coursing its way through your gut. But more than the food, there’s water trapped with the food. Water—plain water that you drank—is a major cause of daily weight fluctuations.
Back in the late ’80s, Autodesk founder John Walker (creator of AutoCAD) got tired of being overweight and decided to tackle it by approaching it as an engineering and management problem. He went on to write The Hacker’s Diet, a book that inspired much of what we’ll discuss in Kilter. Walker hit on the weight fluctuation problem and figured each day’s reading, in isolation, was misleading. The trend line was more reliable.
You can use The Hacker’s Diet Online to log your weight. It’ll turn your logs into a chart plotting the trend. Or you can use a mobile app inspired by the Hacker’s Diet. Our recommendations are Libra (Android) and Happy Scale (iOS). Libra makes charts like this:
The circles are daily readings, the thick red line is the trend, and the blue lines represent the goal weight timeline. Notice those three days in early October where the daily weight readings go up by 1.5 kilos, while the trend continues to drop.
Yes, that is four kilos lost every month, with a t-shirt size dropping from XL to M. You can do it too. We’ll get to how over the next several posts.
Start the new year by setting up a structure for measuring improvements. Your weight is one of the most important metrics and also the easiest to measure. Get a scale today! We’ll continue this series through this week with everything else you need for a base structure.
Kilter is HasGeek’s humble attempt to provide a space for reasoned debate on how your body actually works, and how you can find your own path to good health via better nutrition, fitness and habits.
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If you want to propose a talk at Kilter 2017, submit your talk here.
